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July 13, 2006
Newsgator - Deliver News to Your Enterprise
I had good intentions. I had planned to blog regularly while at AALL in St. Louis. But things just got too busy, as they tend to do at such events. Besides, you really wouldn't want to read anything I might have written after a long day at the exhibit hall. Still, I have a few of what I think are items of significance to discuss. Better late, than not at all!
Newsgator was is the exhibit hall this year, and that’s where I headed first. I had a strategy. I knew I wanted a thorough demo, so I skipped the first program under the correct assumption that the exhibit hall wouldn’t be busy. It’s a good thing, too. Things were relatively quiet, and I spend a good hour looking at Newsgator’s enterprise product.
Newsgator’s RSS reader has been around for a while. It integrates nicely with Outlook, adding folders for RSS feeds in the Outlook folder structure, and is a popular software choice. But I have bigger fish to fry. My fantasy is to make Newsgator the delivery method of choice for all of the firm’s electronic current awareness newsletters, alerts, internal information and outside third-party content. It looks like it might be up to the task. Email alerts could become a thing of the past; forget managing Outlook subscriptions lists. With Newsgator, attorneys could easily subscribe and unsubscribe to the RSS feeds of choice. Newsgator offers an administrative interface to handle your RSS offerings. Feeds can be pushed to a particular group or user, and selected ones can be made mandatory. You can even create topic folders that will combine more than one RSS feed into a single, readable display.
So, for example, if you have an alert running on the name of your firm or organization, you can include a Lexis Publisher feed for general news, and Westlaw Watch for legal news, and offer both RSS feeds in a single folder, so that they can be reviewed separately, or together. And all of this would happen within Outlook, in a folder that looks just like another email folder. Feeds can also be optimized for viewing on handheld devices, such as Blackberries.
If you’d like to provide more focused news, you can choose to set up special keyword searches to run across all your available RSS feeds, collecting that information in to a custom topical feed. For example, you could create a special search on Sarbanes Oxley, to collect news headlines from your available RSS feeds, and presents them as one specialized feed. You can also easily create your own RSS feeds with Newsgator.
There’s a chicken and egg problem, of course. While there’s a lot of information available via RSS, certainly not everything is there yet, so the transition to all RSS alerting can’t happen all at once. On the other hand, Newsgator offers a function that allows you to receive an email and include that email in a Newsgator folder. (This is good for listserv email as well.) But still, any non-RSS email alerts wouldn’t be optimized for RSS, and wouldn’t be as easily scanned by the user. The other problem is that Newsgator can only handle straight text emails, and won’t render html email. That may be remedied in the near future.
It’s one thing to talk about the future, but the burning question, at least in my mind, is what exactly is available in RSS now? Ah, that’s the subject of my next blog.
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