Bringing the latest on the web to your desk
Since the technology I am going to discuss is not exactly the newest thing around many of you may be using it already, but I figured a short post looking at the benefits of RSS technology for the IT Manager might be a good way to keep things rolling.
RSS is short for a ton of things beginning with those letters, really depends on who you ask, but for the purposes of this post I am going to go with Really Simple Syndication. The idea is to subscribe to feeds for the blogs or websites you read. Once you have subscribed, the updates for these sites come to you.
With the discovery of email as a tool to blast market anything and everything, many companies and individuals have begun blocking a good deal of marketing material as Spam. If you ask me, there is still way to much junk mail flying around the Internet, but that is neither here nor there.
With RSS, the end recipient decides which headlines they want to know about and can opt out at anytime by unsubscribing.
RSS works like this:
1. Website or blog publishes a feed of their content using a service like Feed Burner.
2. The readers of a website subscribe to the RSS feed using a feed reader (or aggregator), like Outlook 2007, Google Reader, or Feed Demon.
3. The headlines for the site are delivered to the feed reader as they are added or usually on a user configured update interval.
4. The user clicks or scrolls through the headlines and can read more about those that are of interest by clicking the headline.
Many of you reading this might have used RSS feeds to follow blogs and other news websites which can cut down the time it takes to read your favorite sites. This is definitely why RSS technology is useful to an IT manager. To bring the web right to the desktop or browser so they do not need to chase content down.
Many sites, including TechNet, now alow topics to be subscribed to. For example, if you wanted to be alerted to new content on TechNet, you could subscribe to the What’s New on TechNet feed.
Microsoft communities, and Social bookmarks, are also published as feeds. This can help you keep track of your posts in the forums without waiting for the Inbox ding that there is new content or new replies. When new posts are made to your topic, they are delivered as an update to the feed.
A note about email subscriptions
I know rhat many good things come in as email subscriptions. Many forums offer individual posts or daily/weekly digest emails. These are certainly useful, but with an influx of other emails coming in constantly, it may be too frequent to rely on single update emails from forum sites, but too easily overlooked to use a digest of updates delivered in email. Personal preference will likely dictate how email updates are or are not used by IT.
Getting blog or news or forum posts of relevance in a news reader can significangly save you and your staff time by delivering the update(s) as they arrive.
Warning – too many feeds can be overwhelming
If you are planning to give RSS a try keep in mind that there are many sites out there publishing feeds. For me, I had to close my reader and let it go for a while and then prune like mad to keep only the most useful feeds available at work. I also think it needs to be done again 
I am quite impressed with the reader capabilities of Outlook 2007, but it does not quite get me exactly where I need to be. A third party company called NewsGator offers a free online subscription which will allow you to manage feeds on multiple PCs in one place. They also produce a desktop client for Windows (and one for Mac) that will allow you to bring the online feeds into the desktop.
The nice thing about that is, the feeds that are work related can be sent to the desktop client at the office, and blogs or other content that you follow can be sent to the client on your laptop or at home. The client for Windows, FeedDemon, is a free download from newsgator.com.
Hopefully you will give RSS feeds a look if you arent using them already, and if you are, feel free to list some of your favorites in the comments.
