David Berlind: RSS: The new intranet protocol?

June 26 2006

David Berlind, triggered by some of the coverage coming out of the Collaborative Technologies Conference last week, analyzes what "collaboration" really means in today's technology terms...

When you strip collaboration down to its bare essence, you have people, you have some record of their collaboration (eg: documents), and generally, there's some way of letting those who are collaborating know when something has happened or is about to happen (notification).  The problem was, and to a large extent, still is that there are different and proprietary systems and protocols to technologically support all the activities associated with collaboration.
Berlind's article covers a lot of history in this space, not all of it recognizing the kind of collaboration people have done in Notes for the last fifteen years.  He ultimately comes around to this:
So, leave it to some incredibly open minded people... to come up with freely available standards-based technologies that not only have the idea of formal and informal collaboration baked right in, but that take a far lighter weight approach.  The results? What I think amount to the new intranet.
The article then covers a bunch of stuff about what wikis can do for organizations, based on some of the implementations in-market today.  I would have hoped for some indication, since Notes is mentioned in the article, that things Dominoblog and DominoWiki help blend these worlds, but of course that's my own view of the world.

Still, if RSS, blogs, wikis, are all the tools for today's lightweight intranet, Domino is very well-positioned.  Especially with 7.0.2.

Link: David Berlind: RSS: The new intranet protocol? >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  In the news  Add/View Comments [11]

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  1. 1  Bruce Elgort http://takingnotes.openntf.org | 6/26/2006 4:42:28 PM

    Ed,

    Does Lotus have any plans to introduce a Notes based RSS reader?

  1. 2  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 6/26/2006 7:06:28 PM

    @Bruce - makes sense wouldn't it. Maybe thats Steve Castledines next job after blue washing Dominoblog :)

    A couple of us use Steves RSS reader here and its a brilliant little tool. I love being able to replicate it about our network - such as onto our passthru server in the DMZ (where our logging proxy can't see what sites we're checking updates for :)

  1. 3  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/26/2006 10:06:35 PM

    I deleted a comment here, it was basically an ad/comment spam.

  1. 4  Nathan T. Freeman  | 6/27/2006 3:24:21 AM

    @1 - I'm not sure I'd be too excited about that idea, at least in pre-Hannover. And RSS reader, to be useful, should render the article for you. And Notes HTML rendering is... well, I don't need to talk about it, do I?

    In Hannover, where such a thing would be a compound application, then it would probably work great. At that point, though, it really only makes sense to start incorporating the old web-sharing features from Notes 4.5.

  1. 5  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 6/27/2006 5:56:32 AM

    @4 - I don't think an RSS reader needs to render the article to be useful tool. In my mind the most important thing is to know that a site has been updated - a meaningful abstract is a bonus. Of course we're all different - I accept that many people hate feeds that don't include the full content and thus a Notes RSS reader wouldn't suit them. In which case they can spend some $$$ on Feed Demon and the like.

  1. 6  Charles Robinson  | 6/27/2006 8:35:02 AM

    @5 - Then there are those who don't use/like aggregators at all. :-) Is it possible to be a professional geek *and* a Luddite?

  1. 7  Thomas Schulte  | 6/27/2006 8:41:37 AM

    @Bruce

    That would make perfect sense but as long as IBM does not introduce something like that tightly integrated i'll stay with the tool from Manfred Dillmann which is a good solution for reading rss feeds for an entire company (well a small one at last).

  1. 8  Axel  | 6/27/2006 1:38:42 PM

    For me its impossible to imagine an enterprise platform (.net, j2ee, lamp, RoR included) not supporting rss&atom/blogs/wiki.

  1. 9  Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 6/27/2006 5:45:25 PM

    @5 - Exactly - You don't need to render the article as it was displayed originally. You just need to render the text and/or a summary, then link to the original.

    For me, I use my.yahoo.com as an RSS aggregator. Lots of other aggregators, yes, but this one is free, and you can mix news from Reuters, etc with RSS sources. It's my morning newspaper. It has great features like only showing posts/comments/news stories from the last x number of days. Mine is set at 3 days, so if someone hasn't posted for a weekend, they don't show up - I only see what's new. Many other features, I don't want this post to be an ad. I suggest going to my.yahoo.com and trying it out. IBM/Lotus Engineering could use this design as a good base....

    Having similar functionality in a Notes template has so many advantages - like programming custom features using LotusScript, @Functions, Java, custom fields, treating the RSS output (not the code - the text or, in the case of PodCasts, MP3 files) as an object that can be forwarded, Notes mail integration, and being able to store and review all of this offline....

  1. 10  Bill Brown  | 6/28/2006 1:53:28 PM

    @6 Yes

    Give me plain text email - no HTML. Guess that makes me an email Luddite. But less likely to catch something nasty from a malicious link, and no tracking bugs.

  1. 11  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/28/2006 9:18:15 PM

    @1 - Sorry for not answering this sooner. There is a work item for an RSS reader in Notes "Hannover". As with anything, that could change, and I don't have more detail yet. I'm looking into it...