This panel is about RSS usage within an enterprise in order to solve real world business problems. Some background: the number of pages on the web has grown astronomically since 1994 (the chart makes that obvious) - and that's just talking about public data. Internal data (behind the firewall) tends to be even more siloed. Don't I know it - I got a call from sales this morning asking where on our corporate net to find data she needed :/

Enterprise RSS is all about syndicating internal data (CRM, etc). This data needs to be properly routed based on your internal needs. You might have security needs as well. Use cases:

• Market intelligence (what people are saying about your product)
• Corporate communications (internal/external)
• Material event notification (relevant information as it happens from internal systems)

This is a vendor pitch - KnowNow sells tools around this stuff. To give that end of things, he has some customers - John Delatte of Rentals.com. They provide database driven websites to multi-family properties. They've got a CRM system that focuses on lead management for this domain. So how did they push that to their clients, given:

• Non-technically oriented end users
• Varying (possibly antiquated) hardware/software
• Limited/No IT resources available

Typically, CRM systems for this are fat clients. Given the above, not really possible. They do this via RSS that is routed based on the capabilities of the client's infrastructure. The consolidation of lead notification eliminates excuses and allows tracking.

Cliff Bell - VIO at Phoenix Technologies. They are the BIOS people, and they are getting into the security business. They are looking to make information rollout easier across the global firm. Interesting IT perspective (a breath of fresh air) - IT's job is to make access to information easy on users. As opposed to most IT orgs, where the goal is to make it easy on IT). They push RSS events out to users across a set of approved devices. They ensure than a VPN connection is set up (via script). Information is delivered w/o regard to VPN state at time of event.

Heh. There's a demo, and the slowness of the net connection has brought the demon of demos to the room :)