RSS for Corporate Data / Intranets
3 December 2005A RSS Revelation
While I was rewriting a small web application for work (a phone book application called peoplefinder that will also show you on map, where the persons cube is located), a revelation came to me. Why not create a RSS feed for the basic phone, name, department, location information… With the link pointing to the map page!
We also are testing dotNetNuke as an intranet portal server. So each department has a ‘home page’, along with anything else that helps other departments interact with them, like forms, org charts and a department employee list. So rather than use the standard Text/HTML block, we use the News Feed (RSS) block… Walla! Now we have a department employee list that gets automatically updated with the peopleFinder database that the receptionist updates.
A further Data Warehouse / Data Aggregation Idea
Using RSS in the workplace, with your custom or even off the shelf databases, by creating you own RSS feeds. You can provide the users customized live data pages. You might even call them dashboards.
So RSS is not just for external uses like blogs and news. It is exactly what it stands for “Really Simple Syndication†… or you can think of it as a generalized way to look dissimilar data.
The data aggregation possibilities are endless. Imagine this; You work for a construction company, your CFO cares most about the data contained in; 3 financial reports from your ERP (JDE, Oracle, SAP), 2 project status reports from all the active construction projects, a phone list, his email inbox, his Outlook calendar, and the wall street journal headlines…. Well by using RSS queries to get the data he really wants from all those systems, and using the external feed from wall street journal… (in addition if you wanted the Outlook data you would probably need to compiled all of this into an Outlook Today Template)… So you setup a simple webpage that pulls the data from all these feeds, and displays them to him… or he just uses a RSS news aggregator to view it.
You can see that this is really a simple way to get data organized for people, thus allowing for a productive enjoyable intranet experience.
News Aggregators that I have personally used
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