The syndication barrier
posted by Nathan Zeldes on July 26, 2007
We are starting to look at syndicating MSRs. That’s Monthly Status Reports, and we got lots of them cluttering our mail, some useful, some… well… What we envision is a setup where these pesky reports get published as XML feeds that users can subscribe to in their RSS readers, instead of getting them in their Inbox as emails. This makes perfect sense: it is Pull rather than Push, it allows people to only subscribe to the information they need (and unsubscribe when they no longer need it), and I also conjecture that an RSS reader is less psychologically stressing than an Inbox, because there is no expectation that one clean it up – you glance at the list and only read what you want. And it is the perfect way to get people used to RSS syndication. Then we can expand to other content.
There is only one barrier …
... How do we get people to syndicate their MSRs?
We can’t expect employees – including the many who are non-techies – to write XML in their favorite text editor, can we? What we need is a painless way for users to convert their monthly status reports into RSS. As an example, this might be a tool where the user e-mails the MSR to a given address and it miraculously becomes part of an RSS feed available on the Intranet. It would be nice, of course, if the content were kept on a database at the back end that would be searchable, etc, etc.
Do you know of a good way of doing this? Or of an organization that has done it? Please share your insights; you could save us some time and mistakes as we sift through the possibilities.
I’ll let you know on the blog what we come up with at our end, of course.
Comments (14)
tagged: infoglut, infomania, information overload, RSS, syndication, Web 2.0
Comments
Jul 26 | Michael Molin said:
Nathan, Microsoft is capable to do it.
Jul 26 | Spence Wilhelm said:
Don’t limit it to just MSRs. This same concept should apply to any status information including: personal, organizational, team, project, program, or product.
I like your idea of being able to send a mail message and have it converted to an RSS feed.
Jul 26 | Ray M. said:
Most blog server products generate RSS feeds (including, obviously, this one). Users could post their MSRs into a category or tag that would easily yield an RSS or ATOM feed that would contain only their MSRs. This has the benefit of getting the MSRs into a database and on the web where they can be indexed for search.
If input via e-mail must be supported, some blog servers already have the feature. For many others that provide XML-RPC APIs, writing a gateway to enable the feature would be trivial (or very close).
Jul 26 | JeremyS said:
Why not use the intranet blog site? The editor is easier to use than MS Word, and users have the option of not having the MSR show up in the main site feed. Further, I believe Office ‘07 provides the ability to publish to blogs directly, although I haven’t done this myself.
Jul 26 | Josh Bancroft said:
Simple - use a blog engine. I’m serious.
I LIVE with feeds, both generating and consuming them on a very large scale. But I don’t ever write XML. We are a tool using species, no?
Have employees use their internal blog, and have their manager and interested parties subscribe to the RSS feed. Or have them do it on the Intelpedia wiki, and “watch” or use the per-page RSS feeds in the same way.
The tools are there. We REALLY don’t need to create or bring in another tool for this. We do WAY too much of that already. Let’s use the tools that are there already, which are perfectly suited to the problem at hand.
Aug 01 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Thanks for the inputs, folks! All noted and will be discussed by our project team.
Aug 01 | Annie said:
Agree with Josh. The tools are there. Maybe different ways to slice and dice the tools we have is the answer… Another tool? No way.
Aug 06 | Anthony said:
I believe that the MS Office Suite is pretty capable of doing this. How about taking a look at MS Infopath, with a possible SharePoint Integration?
Aug 08 | Edwin Mehlman said:
I recommend SharePoint 2007 as the way to go.
It can be implemented transparently (emails dump to a SharePoint list configured with an RSS feed) or the reports can be moderated by the manager in question before publishing.
SharePoint 2007 would also allow the reports to be archived effectively, or incorporated into a SharePoint wiki or blog and provide a tailored interface accessible from corporate intranet.
ESM.
Aug 10 | Heath said:
My worry is less about the HOW to syndicate, but whether anyone would actually subscribe.
Very few of my employees read my monthly report, because it’s mostly a regurgitation of the flood of monthlies they’ve already received from their peers.
We’ve been encouraged to really limit the things that go in a monthly (and in some cases don’t even do them), because we want to cut down on over communication.
Personally, a monthly is for me, so that at the end of the year I can print out 12 pieces of paper, hand them to my boss and say “here’s what I accomplished this year”.
Aug 13 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Actually, Heath, my biggest concern is whether anyone would POST… after all, people want to get noticed, and a Push model assures them of that better than a Pull model. It will require a serious culture change any way you go about it… and that’s what I hope we’ll be able to achieve, working with management and employees together.
Consider also that a properly done system would archive the MSRs in searchable form - so one could query the system for “all MSRs in the company in the past year that talk of X”, rather than just subscribe to specific feeds in real time.
Aug 20 | tbear said:
The first thing that pops into my mind is the security issue. I assume you can set permissions on each feed that your offer, but then would the publisher have to have special tags linked in with PDLs or some other implicit secure channel?
Also, as others mentioned, if it isn’t as easy as email then not only is there a problem in getting people to use it, but why would you want to? What time savings is it providing or problem that it would be solving?
I’d personally like a projector that I can just project my weekly status up on the ceiling like a bat signal. And then have a sort of Bloomberg-like LCD display outside my cube with news, forcasts, and a ticker-tape crawler so that people wouldn’t ask stupid questions.
Aug 20 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Hey, tdbear, I love your bat signal/bloomberg idea. Unfortunately it wouldn’t really work for us in our highly distributed workforce - that’s why we need a virtual ceiling to project on… hence RSS!
Aug 25 | Alex Balk said:
Using blogs for MSRs may prove quite efficient:
1. It would allow for easy syndication
2. Archiving and searching would become trivial
3. Comments can be wonderful (documented, almost inline) feedback
3. It would make provide with an (official) opportunity to get employees familiar with the blogging interface… and they might actually like it beyond MSRs
Now, if you could send a mail and have it automatically transformed into a blog post, everyone’s a winner.