Feed Me!
Headline Syndication for Intranets
by Amy Gahran
05-Oct-2004 --
So you have an intranet. Perhaps it's supported by a costly and complex content management system. It's full of rich, useful content that could enhance many types of projects and collaboration throughout your enterprise. Unfortunately, most people within your organization probably only access a small, narrow portion of the of that information. They aren't aware of what the rest of the intranet can offer because they don't browse beyond their normal "info-grazing" range.
Meanwhile, your bosses are wondering why the organization is spending money and time on a tool that few people are putting to good use. One way to increase interest in, and usage of, intranets is to tell people what's available there in an effective way. On that front, here's an opportunity to consider: You can feed relevant content to them, in nice, digestible chunks of headlines, allowing employees to quickly browse and choose what is relevant to them at that particular moment.
Webfeeds and Your Intranet
If you aren't already using it, you've probably at least heard about a new online communication channel: webfeeds (RSS or Atom format). Also called headline syndication, webfeeds are a way to announce and provide access to your content. They also allow easy syndication of content from outside sources to your intranet. Consider that this publishing option is:
- Direct
- Time-saving and convenient for users
- Completely spam-proof
- Can be automated as part of your existing intranet publishing process (read: little or no extra work after setup).
Also, since the technology involved is fairly simple, webfeeds usually are one of the least expensive ways to publish online.
To date, webfeeds have mainly been used in conjunction with the publicly-accessible web -- hence the nickname webfeed. For instance, most weblogs and many news sites now offer webfeeds (indicated rather inadequately by those cryptic little orange or blue rectangles that say XML or RSS -- e.g., check out the one in the right margin of this page). However, feeds also can be put to good use on intranets. In fact, intranets may offer even a greater variety of useful, valuable, and mutually beneficial opportunities for feeds. Still, webfeeds appear to be a largely overlooked in the intranet realm...but that may be changing.
From the employee's perspective, webfeeds can provide more clarity, continuity, and chronological context than two common existing alternatives to getting the word out -- intranet index pages and e-mail newsletter/alerts. When viewing webfeed content in a reader or feed-enabled browser (more about that below), users see each item listed chronologically, with the most recent item on top. Each feed item typically includes a headline, summary, and a live link to the content being announced. This means that employees don't have to click through several pages to locate new content, nor do they have to find and scan through several separate e-mail messages to catch up on the latest news or information. Depending on the webfeed client being used, announcements of new content for selected feeds may pop up on the user's computer screen as soon as it arrives.
Content Strategies for Intranet Feeds
As with any communication medium, ultimately webfeeds are all about content. No one would subscribe to them if the information wasn't worthwhile. There are four general ways to put webfeeds to use on an intranet. Here are some examples of the kinds of content each might carry:
- Create general in-house webfeeds: For instance, you could offer a feed of major in-house news, or of new/updated intranet content, or job openings. Making centralized content available in this way helps level the in-house information playing field.
- Integrate content from external webfeeds into your intranet: For instance, you could leverage webfeed syndication to supply headlines with links to current news stories that mention your organization to pages in your intranet. This could be done manually or automatically (with some custom programming). Or you could syndicate to your intranet the content of feeds from other organizations that directly affect your organization. (Run an HR department for a St. Louis, Missouri company? You probably want to keep track of what the state Dept. of Labor and Industrial Relations is doing.)
- Syndicate in-house content across departments (or between different sections of your intranet): For instance, your research library might wish to announce its latest acquisitions, updates, and offerings. Your R&D dept. might want to announce new developments. Your marketing or outreach teams might wish to keep other departments updated on their efforts. Cross-departmental project teams may wish to announce their progress. In-house gurus publishing K-blogs will see a wider reach. Your company softball team may want to post its game schedule. Headline syndication is ideal for all of these scenarios.
- Custom feeds specified by individuals: If you have a very large, diverse organization, it may be difficult to predict which feeds would best serve people's needs. If many people in your organization already are webfeed fans, it might be helpful to set up an option for your intranet search engine that would convert search results into an ongoing webfeed. For instance, an engineer in your company who is especially interested in "conducting polymers" might search the intranet for that term, then create a webfeed based on that search. Afterward, she'd see a new webfeed posting each time content matching that search criteria is added to the intranet. The results might look something like this custom feed generated by Blogdigger.
It's important to note here that feeds aren't just for "news." In fact, done right, they invert the traditional relationship between news maker and consumer. By highlighting potentially everything that is new (as opposed to official corporate news), headline syndication can empower employees to decide what is novel and meaningful to them as individuals, then read accordingly.
Getting Employees on Board
Just like you need a web browser to effectively access the web, you may need a feed reader of some kind to subscribe to and read webfeeds. Therefore, one of the first hurdles faced in implementing webfeeds for an intranet is to make sure that the people with access to that intranet all have some kind of feed reader in place and know how to use it. A feed reader (also called a news reader or RSS aggregator) can be a standalone program (like SharpReader), an online service (like Bloglines), an extension to an existing program (like Pluck), a feature of an existing browser (like Firefox's Live Bookmarks), or simply a set of headline pages that ingest feeds and convert them to HTML format for easy viewing.
All of those examples are available free of charge, and thus would be most economical to implement across an organization. However, depending on your organization's resources and requirements, you might also want to consider purchasing slicker feed readers such as the standalone application Feed Demon, or Newsgator (which integrates with Microsoft Outlook). Once your intranet users have feed readers or feed-enabled browsers installed, they can use them to subscribe to and read feeds originating both inside your organization and on the net.
Nevertheless, learning anything new (however useful) always seems like a hassle to busy people. They might need a bit of training and encouragement to start using webfeeds. Offering fun, low-pressure webfeed workshop, perhaps even custom workshops for each department, can help people navigate the initial learning curve of using webfeeds and also get them thinking creatively about this medium. Webfeed training also can be an ideal opportunity to learn which kinds of feeds individuals or departments might find useful. Like everything else with your intranet, people will be likely to subscribe to webfeeds when they feel they've participated in their development.
Technology: Publishing the Feeds
Setting up your initial feeds might seem a bit tricky at first, but often proves quite easy. Fortunately, many content management systems already support RSS 1.0 output, or some kind of XML that can be adapted to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which underlies RSS. Check your CMS specifications or ask your vendor to see whether you already have some webfeed capability built-in. If not, it's not rocket science to extend a CMS to generate webfeeds, since at their core, they only represent a simple type of XML output.
One issue that may arise immediately, though, is whether your content models and authoring norms account for a suitable "description" field, which is accessible to (but not required by) news reader applications. Alternatively, you may be able to use other tools (either off-the-shelf or custom programming) to parse content from your intranet or other sources and convert it into a webfeed for use within your organization or elsewhere.
Ultimately, whether and how to implement in-house webfeeds depends entirely on the unique needs of your company. It may not suit everyone. However, headline syndication is an incredibly versatile tool – especially to communicate important new information to an in-house audience that may already be hopelessly buried under e-mail. If you can put some resources into initial setup and user training, webfeeds might end up becoming surprisingly popular within your organization.