NewsGator Enterprise Server Wins InfoWorld Test Center Shooutout

For several months now, we have been talking about the increased adoption of NewsGator Enterprise Server and the maturing of the market for Enterprise RSS Solutions. One of the reasons that we have seen significant adoption (the product has twice as many deployments as the rest of the offerings combined) from companies of all sizes across a wide range of industries, is that we both listen to our customers and also introduce innovative features in advance of broad market requirements.

This approach was not only validated by the rigorous selection process that Intel undertook in choosing technologies for the recently announced SuiteTwo Enterprise 2.0 solution, but also in a newly published review of Enterprise RSS Servers by Mike Heck of InfoWorld Labs. The InfoWorld review notes our leadership in several categories that are important to ensuring a succesful project and rapid ROI. They include:

• Centralized Managment of Groups, Users and Subscriptions- "NGES user management went quickly. After selecting a user group, clicking one button allowed me to subscribe users to a default set of feeds, block feeds and podcasts through a blacklist, and perform other tasks, such as managing log-ins for secure and premium feeds."
• Security- "Of note, NGES’s developers understand this security part well. For instance, they’ve included their own routines to detect and remove malicious attack code that could be contained within RSS feeds. And in Windows 2003 domains, secure feeds are retrieved on behalf of users without needing to access or store users’ passwords."
• Platform and Device Options- "Another NGES distinction is its many possible interfaces. Power users have a plug-in for Outlook that integrates feeds from the Enterprise Server, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox. NewsGator Enterprise Server balances needs across your organization."
• Customized Taxonomy- "Using NGES’s Web Administration site, I found the existing folder taxonomy -- which includes typical departments such as HR and legal -- to be a straightforward starting point, and I customized it to match my organization structure."
• User Discovery of Feeds- "NewsGator helps you quickly find information from potentially thousands of feeds. There’s a standard category filter to discover relevant articles within a feed or folder -- and a handy search form for locating feeds using keywords. These worked well, but I often relied on the innovative Recommend feature within search; it provided extra precision by ranking results based on what feeds others in my group subscribe to, along with their rating. Last, Smart Feeds pull back content-matching keywords into custom feeds."
• Reporting- "The NewsGator server logs and reports activity, such as who uses the system and the most-read feeds. As my testing progressed, this information proved valuable in discovering both feeds of little interest, which I removed, and popular ones, which I made sure were added to every group’s default package."

The point here is that we strove to create a product that would provide the most value to the most companies, not just create the prettiest interface to a particular application. Heck sums up our philosophy nicely when he notes, "NewsGator Enterprise Server balances needs across your organization. It’s easy to administer, especially getting relevant information to casual users through Outlook; in fact, they don’t even need to know what RSS means. Yet power users get their choice of interfaces, such as FeedDemon, synchronized to NGES."

On the whole, he gave NGES an 8.8 out of a possible 10 rating, the only product that received an "Excellent" designation.

For more insight on this topic and the review, please read our Founder and CTO Greg Reinacker's blog post.

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