Giving Some Love to the Lotus Community

For those of you who have been following this blog since it's inception a few years ago, you've heard us talk a lot about the Microsoft platform and our deep integration with Exchange, Outlook, Active Directory, SharePoint, IE7 and Vista. On the Enterprise side however, we've also been providing support for other platforms along the way, namely around non-AD LDAP stores and Java-based portals, but we weren't providing e-mail client readers for non-Outlook users. A large number of our customers and prospects, particularly in financial services, telecom, pharma and chemical industries, are longtime users of Lotus Notes. Today, we're happy to announce that we have new client-based plug-ins for the Lotus environment.

The support revolves around two different products. The NewsGator Plug-in for Lotus Notes, which is currently available, provides a client-based reader for the most popular installed versions of Notes, 6.5 and 7.0, as well as the recently unveiled Notes 8.0 product. The functionality is similar to what we offer in NewsGator Inbox, but shows up as a separate application in Notes as opposed to part of the mail system. See the screenshot below:

The other component to the announcement is the NewsGator Plug-In for Lotus Sametime, which will be going into beta shortly. Lots of people are excited about this enterprise-class instant messaging client (for those of you who are Forrester Research clients, Erica Driver has a nice report about what IBM is up to ), and we're delivering the capability to read articles within the Sametime client. Like all of our other RSS feed-reading options, both of these clients will synchronize subscriptions and read states with all of their counterparts.

One of our many key differentiators is that we've always provided customers with the broadest range of options for their employees to read their feeds, giving them the ability to deliver the right information and the right time to the right place and minimizing the need to learn new apps. Today's announcement adds another important component to our catalog and gives Notes shops the same option to deliver content to the Web, e-mail clients, mobile devices, portals and desktops.

On a totally different note, for those of you who have been posting comments to the blog, I apologize if it's taking a long time for them to appear. We've been getting hitting by the same "spam bot" who keeps putting inappropriate links in comments. I now have to accept or delete comments manually and sometimes it takes a day or two for me to do so. Typepad used to have the option of blocking comments with specific words or from specific domains, but they either took it out or hid it. (Hello Six Apart folks- can one of you let me know how to fix this?). So in any event, apologies in advance.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Lotus, Notes

Follow the Presidential Race With NewsGator

Time was when the presidential campaign got underway about the time the primary season started. With the advent of 24/7 news cycles and the Internet, that has completely changed. Though the primaries are almost a year away, we are debating the virtues and foibles of candidates on both sides of the political spectrum. Youtube mashups and bloggers have changed the way the game is played.

To keep you from having to spend all your time looking for campaign information, we have come up with a new category in our taxonomy. It’s called Election 2008, and in it are feeds and posts of all political persuasions to keep you up-to-date with the latest campaign news and views. There are candidates’ blogs, PACs, political news pages from mainstream media and bloggers of every stripe from Instapundit to Daily Kos.

When you click Add Feeds in your reader, you will get a page with a list of categories. Click on Election 2008 and start subscribing to the feeds you want. We will be adding feeds as we find them, and if you notice some great blog or news source we have missed, let us know in the comments below and we’ll take care of it.

NewsGator Buzz and Editor's Desk - Beta Launch

It’s a busy week!  Earlier this week NewsGator Online went to Beta, and now NewsGator's own widget framework ("NewsGator Buzz and Editor's Desk") is following right behind. We actually launched our Video Buzz widget a few weeks ago - so the focus of this release is on Editor's Desk, which is the 'widget builder' behind video and other Buzz products. Editor's Desk allows you to quickly create and manage buzz widgets that can be deployed on other sites.

The benefit of our buzz widgets is twofold:

1. Increase stickiness - like USA Today's "Across the Web" functionality, you can present content on your site from a variety of sources and still maintain post level editorial control.
2. Extend your reach  - syndicate your content by giving users an easy way to include your own branded widgets on external sites.

The best part about it? Its easy to get started. Just point your browser over to http://www.newsgatornews.com to see some demos of the technology and set up an account. Registration is free - and while you're over there - if you'd like to see what the system is really capable of, take a look at the Gallery.

NewsGator Online Beta Awaits Your Input

We're an excitable bunch, anyway, but we are really buzzed about the beta release of an updated version of NewsGator Online. We haven’t made changes to NG Online for a while, and we have been listening to our users who want a faster, more efficient feed-reading experience.

We think we have come up with something that answers those concerns and then some. To make sure, we are inviting you to give the beta version a quick spin around the block and tell us what you think. Basically, the beta reader works faster and with less page views. One of my favorite changes is that you no longer have to click to different pages when you have a large number of posts; now they appear as you scroll down through them.

As with all betas, we haven’t added all the features yet. We have some ideas, but we really want to hear yours -- suggestions, comments and criticisms are always welcome. You can still opt for the classic NewsGator version, but if you try the beta and want to comment or give feedback, send your thoughts to our forum. We’re obsessed with making your feed-reading experience the best it can be. Your feedback makes that process work faster and more efficiently.

Straight Talk About RSS

One of the complaints about RSS has been that it’s too geeky and not easily explainable in an elevator pitch. And it’s probably true that those of us who have been living and breathing this stuff the last couple of years sometimes forget that.

That’s where John Mahoney and Instant Information come in. They are developing a video series that explains how internet users can benefit from RSS. The first in the series, a seven-minute explanation of what RSS feeds are and how and why to use them, is now available for viewing here. It’s as good a basic introduction to RSS as I’ve come across, with practical, easy-to-understand tips for improving the RSS experience.

While you're at it, don't miss Mahoney’s website, The DigitalEdgeBlog, with a great current post about how personal videos and online viewing have changed the landscape for presidential candidates and their ability to control their own messages.

NG Product Podcasts

If you’re finding yourself using your mobile device to access the Internet these days, you will want to check into the NewsGator Go mobile product, which allows you to read your feeds and synchronize them from a cellphone. Released in 2006, Go has only been available for Windows mobile phones.

But Go Developer Kevin Cawley has come up with a fresh update, being released today, that will support recent Java-enabled telephones and all Blackberry devices. Cawley explains the new features and looks into his mobile crystal ball in a podcast interview.

And Developer Nick Harris, who has built NewsGator Inbox for Outlook, talks about how that product has evolved, as well as the genesis and creation of interesting features like NewsGator Screensaver, Toolbox, and NewsGator Desktop in a podcast here.

RSS-Enabling Enterprise Content

When a lot of people think about RSS, they think about its value in delivering content from news sites and blogs. While this external content has a significant amount of value, particularly to PR professionals, marketers and corporate librarians, some of the most critical information that companies deal with everyday is published internally. Many of the leading ERP, CRMS, ECMS and portal providers have added (or will soon add) RSS as an output option from their systems. This wider availability of RSS content is helping to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise RSS systems such as NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES).

But what about the content coming from home-grown applications or even content locked up in Excel documents? Clearly there is value in  being notified via RSS if their is a bottleneck on the production line or if new inputs have changed a financial model. Today's announcement with /n Software addresses that specific need. Under terms of the agreement, NewsGator will be selling a branded version of their upcoming RSSBus Feed Server, which makes it easy to RSS-enable content locked in SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets and custom applications.

The combination of RSSBus and NewsGator's Professional Services team will be able to greatly expand the amount of content available to be consumed via NewsGator's Enterprise RSS solutions and provide additional value for companies looking at NGES to improve productivity of their knowledge workers and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their internal communications processes.

The NewsGator-branded version of RSSBus will be generally available next quarter, but if you are interested in using the product now, please contact us and a member of our professional services team will discuss how we can help you in the interim.

Just a quick reminder for next Tuesday's Webinar featuring Oliver Young from Forrester and Dave Keller from NewsGator. If you want to get a good understanding of the benefits of Enterprise RSS and see what specific companies are doing, this is a great opportunity. The response has been overwhelming so far and we just added additional spaces, but we expect those to fill up fast.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, RSSBus

NewsGator and the new USA TODAY website

The new USA TODAY website has launched!

This is more than just an update to the look and feel, the biggest changes are found in the added functionality. USA TODAY is promoting the concept of "network journalism", which is a notion that published stories are just the beginning of a larger conversation, and that content can be improved with the participation of a community.

So they've enabled several new features to support the mission, and updated other features to fit within the new model. What we're most excited about is how USA TODAY has implemented NewsGator technology. Previously, USA TODAY had placed us in a separate area on the site, under the "my.usatoday.com" domain. That domain is gone as they've placed their personalization features directly into each of the USA TODAY section fronts. Now, instead of having to visit a separate experience to customize your news, you can do so directly within the main USA TODAY pages. Just visit the "Across the Web" tab on each page and choose your news. Scanning headlines from other sites couldn't be easier (See the difference in the images below)

Ken Paulsen has an article about the redesign, and I think this quote sums it up well.

"In many ways, it is an extension of the mission we set for ourselves nearly 25 years ago when the newspaper first launched: to present the news of the day in a concise, accessible, even entertaining fashion that was, above all, respectful of the reader."

Our hats are off to all the people at USA TODAY who made this happen, we're honored that we're able to help.