Jon Udell recently mentioned this and the comments and his post are quite useful.  In particular the clarifications around the behavior of Outlook 2007 and the common feed store.

What surprises me is that people consistently seem to think that authenticated RSS is rare, on the Internet maybe – but definitely not in the enterprise.  Although the comments do show that a lot of people and a lot of readers do support authenticated feeds I suspect that most of them will only work with Basic Authentication over SSL.

I have recently been thinking a bit about Enterprise RSS and getting frustrated by key features that seem to be missing, confusing or partially implemented, two examples being:

• Lack of unread status syncing between multiple clients of the Windows Common Feed Store
• Lack of support for basic authentication in the Windows Common Feed Store

I have also been thinking more broadly about security and management issues in general, so I was pleased to come across this post on the Collaborative Thinking blog which provided a useful list of topics to consider concerning enterprise RSS, my additions are in bold:

Security

• Ensure support for SSL and related authentication methods
• Ensure support for basic authentication over SSL as well as NTLM and Kerberos (which are mainly of interest in a Microsoft environment only)
• Some way to authenticate to RSS feeds that are protected by forms based authentication, common when enterprise portals are involved
• Browser add-ins should run “Internet zone” or “restricted sites zone”
• Require Windows XP SP2 Attachment Execution Service support
• Ask about block lists, content filtering, and handling of malformed feeds
• Outline how RSS enclosures are managed
• Require ACL’s per feed at group/user levels integrated via AD and LDAP
• Ability to encrypt the feed store and enclosures,  a lot of enterprise data is going to end up in this store, especially if enclosures are used
• I am also interested to see if some form of DRM could be applied to enclosures, with the digital rights acquired for the download user at the same time as the enclosure is downloaded.  I am concerned that enclosure enabled document libraries will result in very efficient document hoarding and resulting data leakage.  This may be a scenario that’s supported by Outlook and SharePoint 2007 IRM,  but I suspect that the common feed store DOES’ NT acquire the rights for the logged on user as part of the download process, which will make it difficult impossible to view the enclosures offline.

De-duping

• Assess how multiple updates to posts are handled and impact to read/unread marks
• Synchronization
• Check to make sure read/unread marks are managed across clients and devices

Storage

• Primarily a concern when feeds are sent into e-mail systems
• Potentially a compliance concern   

Network Utilization

• Assess download schedule management
• IE7 “salting” the interval (is it good enough)
• Is the RSS 2.0 Time To Live (TTL) tag honored
• Use of / support for Incremental feed updates (RFC 3229 (“Delta Encoding in HTTP”))
• Compression of feeds and enclosures

Management

• Ability to associate automatic feed subscription with LDAP directory group memberships, this really is going to be essential if feeds subscriptions becomes important to process compliance, e.g. a person gets informed when their Quality Management System is updated via a RSS feed.
• Ability to track usage

Personalized Feeds

• Not really an easy feature to implement at this time

Attensa and Newsgator seem to be addressing several of these issues,  but Microsoft and IBM don’t so it will be interesting to see how enterprises get on when they deploy Office System 2007 and Notes Hannover.

Standards Blog provides some useful information on the Workplace Office client.  The context is a series of articles looking at various ODF clients of which Workplace Managed Client is one.

I’m pleased to see that IBM are now picking up speed in their attempts to engage with their community through blogs and other direct to consumer communication channels which is good news as I have previously been a bit critical of their efforts. 

However there is still not much diversity of opinion.  In the IBM world there tends to be one information source and several commentators, which contrasts strongly with the Linux and Microsoft worlds for example where we see many independent people reporting the same thing and much more comment.  So its always useful see see independent posts like this, even if only the questions asked are independent.

Brian Madden has a lot of useful comments on each feature, my favourites are in bold.

Who says that the lines between emails, events and tasks are clear? Users need to manage their information according to project, not according to application. Chandler offers heterogeneous collections, able to contain any kind of Chandler item as well as resources that might otherwise live in random places in the file system. Naturally, searches can also cover all application areas at once or alternately be limited to specific kinds of items.

More subtly, we believe it’s powerful to allow users to not only put their peanut butter and chocolate in the same cupboard, but also to mix their peanut butter and chocolate together in the same item. We call this stamping, as in “I want to stamp this note as a message” or “I want to stamp this message as a task”. The user adds email-ness or task-ness to the pre-existing item without creating a separate item. Consider some of the possible use cases for this:

• An incoming email leads to an ill-defined task. Rather than have to create a task and try to decide exactly what it is and what to call it, just stamp the email as a task to be sure to come back to it later.
• A co-worker has to be notified about an upcoming event. Rather than create a mail and give it a subject then copy information from the event to the email, just stamp the event as a message and fill in the “To” field.

Stamping replaces the flagging feature that traditional email clients often support. Flagging is tantalizingly close to being useful for many people but lacks the ability to define due dates or detail to explain why something was flagged. Since stamping an email as a task is just one click, it’s as easy as flagging and doesn’t force a series of decisons. All the user has to know is that there is probably something to do, sometime, and stamp as task. Later the user can remove the task stamp, assign a date, or add more details to the description of what has to be done.

The image in the sidebar shows an event that was stamped as an email, adding “to” and “from” fields but keeping the same subject, body, and all the event attributes.

Some of these ideas seem to have found their way into Notes Hanover and it’s activity explorer.

Voice Messaging System

Voice mail can now be stored in the mailbox and accessed from a unified inbox in Outlook, Outlook Web Access, on a mobile device, or from a standard telephone. This unification improves employee productivity by simplifying access to the most common types of communications. It also dramatically reduces cost by removing the need for a standalone voice mail system and by taking advantage of any existing investments in Active Directory. Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging can be connected with a legacy private branch exchange (PBX) infrastructure through an IP gateway, or can be directly connected with certain IP PBX installations.

Self-Service Voice Mail Support

Using Outlook Web Access, users can request a reset of their voice mail PIN, set their voice mail greeting, record their out-of-office voice message, and specify mailbox folders to access when calling in by phone to hear e-mail messages through text-to-speech translation.

Outlook Voice Access

Users can access their Exchange mailbox using a standard telephone, available anywhere. Through touch tone or speech-enabled menus, they can hear and act on their calendar, listen to e-mail messages (translated from text to speech), listen to voice mail messages, call their contacts, or call users listed in the directory.

Play on Phone

Exchange Unified Messaging allows users to playback voice messages received in their Exchange inbox on a designated phone. This feature is useful when a user is in a public place and does not want to play the voice mail over their computer speakers. Play on Phone routes the voice mail to a cell phone, desk phone, or other number specified by the user.

Outlook 2007 Experience

Outlook Web Access, an AJAX application since its first release with Exchange Server 5.5, provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser. New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Access SharePoint documents without a VPN or tunnel using LinkAccess
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• View content in Managed E-mail Folders
• Retrieve voice mail or fax messages through Unified Messaging integration
• Search the Global Address List

Search

Information can be quickly found from a mobile device using the search capability of Exchange ActiveSync. When executing a search from a mobile device, both the local device store and the user’s entire Exchange mailbox are queried. Results found through the over-the-air search of the Exchange mailbox can be rapidly retrieved to the device. This capability enables access to information sent or received days, weeks, or even months before, regardless of the storage limitations of the mobile device.

Direct Push

Mobile devices incorporating Exchange ActiveSync maintain a secure connection with Exchange Server 2007, receiving new or updated e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks as soon as they arrive on the server. This push method optimizes bandwidth usage while keeping users up-to-date.

• Multiple monitors attached to a single card – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with the same driver (which normally means the same chip set family) – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with different drivers – no support for Glass

or more details check out this link

The graphic was done in Excel 2007.

Our employees were vital contributors to our most successful year in National’s 47-year history, and we wanted to equip them with the tools to help us create more value for our customers

This is pretty original,  I’ve heard of companies giving their employees similar gifts for great performance, but never the whole workforce.  It seemed to me a pretty bold move, especially when you consider how they plan to use the iPods, once all their employees have them:

We’re looking for new and more effective ways to communicate with our employees — and the iPods will help us do both,” said Brian L. Halla, National’s chairman and CEO.

I got more insights from a Podcast by Podtech:

National Semiconductor announced Monday it’s just given every one of its 8,500 employees a 30GB video iPod. But employees won’t just be catching up on soaps or rocking out at work. Jeff Weir, the company’s director of Worldwide PR, said the company will be podcasting corporate messages, product information and the like – right into its employees’ earbuds.

I really liked this idea,  I think the iPod could a great corporate communications channel and this certainly seems to the the vision of the company as I listened to the podcast, however I was a little disappointed the more I heard:

1. There was a lot of focus on the delivery of broadcast quality training and corporate communications, produced professionally from a studio,  this ruled out a lot of potential content
2. The idea of letting individuals within the business podcast was not being considered
3. The idea of routinely recording audio and web conferences and making them available had not been considered
4. The idea of ad-hoc communication via podcasts, for example letting managers podcast weekly status reports etc was not on the agenda
5. Microsoft channel 9 type video blogging that would increase cross company awareness had not been considered

Overall it seemed an opportunity missed and many of these additional use cases could have been achieved just by providing managers with an iPod and an external microphone.  Even so it seemed that National Semiconductor would have generated a lot of goodwill with it’s employees and that’s worth a lot right, wrong:

1. Even though National spun the iPods as a reward to the employees, those leaving the company were asked for them back, which generated a lot of negative press
2. It seems that a lot of employees didn’t seem to understand the importance of the iPod as a necessary part of the new way of doing business at National and decided to give their iPods away or sell them on eBay,  as soon as you can no longer assume everyone has an iPod it’s value is reduced.

Would I have done the same?  Not on reflection, instead I would have given every employee a Windows Mobile 5 Phone (assuming they were a Microsoft Exchange user), and a 2GB SD card and a USB cable for work and home.  I would have also made it clear that it was a company tool, that they had to use until they left the company at which point they could keep it.  That way I would have:

1. provided everyone with a platform for mobile email, calendar and applications
2. reduced my phone handset costs
3. still provided a great platform for podcasts
4. not had the problems with people leaving, because they could take it with them

Although I guess I would have created myself another problem – who picked up the bill for the mobile data usage!

The best companies will figure out how to blend top down enabablement with bottom up productivity and innovation.  It’s great to see Gartner recognising this at last, in the past Gartner’s TCO model for PC’s has promoted the idea of “stop users fiddling with their desktop”  now they seem to recognise that at least for some users that fiddling was actually productivity tuning and process innovation!  Here is an encouraging quote from Jeffery Mann, a research VP at Gartner:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.
We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

Of course it’s not about no control.  In my view it’s about IT progressively withdrawing to managing only those things that are business critical and enabling security and connectivity services, and even then considering whether they need to manage applications and data or whether they can get away with just controlling a standard web service, RSS feed, or email feed.  In Gartner’s words:

Does this mean we should throw open the doors to every virus-laden, spyware-filled download we can find? Or post sensitive information on any blog site we care to? Of course not. Loosening control does not mean giving up all control. It could mean enabling four or five different products in a particular technology area instead of just one (but not any). Innovative IT managers are experimenting with virtualization to shield experimental trials from sensitive corporate processes. In some cases, it will mean trusting employees to do the right thing, something businesses are accustomed to doing in other areas (like contract negotiations or travel expenses), but not done often enough within IT policies.

I like the idea that Jeff presents here of providing a choice of applications,  as this fits very well with my opening point about the different ways that people like to work.  As we see more applications that can interact with standard web services like RSS in a predictable way we will be able to move in this more flexible direction.

I thought it would be useful to describe some of the characteristics of the newsgator approach:

• A loosely integrated client and services platform
• The services platform only asserts itself when it can add value to the user,  otherwise it gets out of the way and lets me get on with the job
• An eco-system of different client software optimised to address different platforms, user-types and user preferences, some supplied by newsgator but others just integrated with the services platform using their APIs
• Different installations of newsgator online enabled software are aware of activities on the other clients, for example my work client is aware of what I have already read or subscribed to at home
• Each installation of a client can optionally have a different configuration, so my work client could be configured differently to my home client if that’s what I wanted 
• A complementary web interface for when an optimised smart client is not available, or for when a web interface is the optimised solution
• All of my configuration data is held by the services platform and be easily extracted and moved some place else, in fact other systems can use it in place as it is all url addressable
• All (actually nearly all but they are moving in the right direction) configuration data is held by the services platform, so that once I have authenticated to it from a freshly installed client it seems like my environment again
• Higher performance than would be possible with a client only approach

In summary, the approach provides me with considerable freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness, pretty inspiring!

Now if Microsoft can do the same thing by utilising Windows Live to make the experience of multiple personal PC’s, work and personal PCs, a household of PCs, PCs and Mobiles, multiple identities, sharing data, PC migrations and upgrades etc more seamless and deliver freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness then I will be very impressed. 

It’s interesting that watching Ray Ozzie perform at the Financial Analyst meeting recently he definitely seems to have a newsgator-like vision for the eco-system of Microsoft products and services, and some of his recent innovations around the use of Live Clipboard and RSS and Simple List Extensions seem to indicate that he sees the value in delivering these innovations using standards so there may be hope.

The only thing I really need to round off the newsgator experience is for every bit of configuration data to persist server side (flags, snippets, saved searches etc) and applications that stream down to my new PC automatically with no possibility of conflicts with other applications and no administrative rights to run or install, for that I guess we need them to be .Net ClickOnce applications or wait for Microsoft to build Softgrid like virtualization support into their operating systems and Softgrid like streaming into their packaging approach and yes I do know that Microsoft has just acquired Softricity!

This would be a vision for Software as a Service that would really appeal to me!

[seamless] ignores the fact that at the “seam” lots of things change. Bandwidth, latency, price, maybe ownership, control, security, context and lots of other things. While the user should (in some cases like an ongoing voice call) have minimal interaction, the device itself and its resident applications need to be fully bearer-aware to enable a good user experience, especially for data applications. Moving from a low-latency to high-latency connection has a huge impact on software that has complex “hand-shaking” procedures, for example. And moving from an unlimited-data environment (eg home or office WiFi) to one that is tariffed per-MB clearly needs intervention. If I have anti-virus software, for example, I don’t want it downloading 5MB of stuff unannounced, especially if I’m roaming. And I want the music application on the device to recognise I’m at home on WiFi, and default to getting MP3s from my PC hard drive, rather than defaulting to the operator music portal.

This is a really great insight and demonstrates a key issue,  that one really needs to think things through from the end users perspective,  and not just from a technology perspective.  In my personal case I actually go so far as to have different user accounts that I use on my different devices, and replicate different data to each, because each device is setup in a way that’s optimised for it’s usage context, so whilst I want some things integrated I want control and I certainly don’t want someone else deciding where to put all of the seams.

In fact I run an allowance system of sorts myself at the moment,  I gave up long ago expecting my company to invest as much in the tools of my trade as I would have invested if I was given the choice.  So when I started working from home I took the money that I was saving in fuel, personal broadband and other incidental travel and office related expenses and stuck it in a dedicated bank account.  I now draw on that account – without guilt – whenever I need/want to invest in my personal effectiveness and I am much happier as a result,  I no longer spend every day wishing my laptop had more memory, or wishing I had a second display, or a better headset,  I just buy them!