USA.gov Unveils Breaking-News & Information Feeds on NewsGator RSS Platform

The Federal government today announced the availability of NewsGator-powered RSS breaking news and information feeds on their USA.gov website -- the government's official online portal.  The new service (http://news.usa.gov), lets anyone subscribe to RSS feeds on USA.gov, allowing them to receive pertinent news and information through their feed readers.

The USA.gov site offers the following RSS feed categories: Agriculture, Business & Economics, Consumer News & Recalls, Defense & International, Education & Employment, General Gov & Reference, Environment & Energy, Family, Home & Community, Health & Nutrition, Public Safety & Law and Science & Technology.

By turning to NewsGator, USA.gov can now leverage the technology, infrastructure, and people behind the world's most popular RSS readers for Windows, Web and Mac; this includes NewsGator's NetNewsWire feed reader, which is one of TIME Magazine's top 10 iPhone Apps for 2008.

As Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Consumer division explains, "NewsGator pioneered commercial RSS and today we have the only proven scalable RSS infrastructure for delivering the steep mandate for open government access that the Federal government is committed to delivering."  He adds, "the Federal government is awash in content and it is an exciting challenge to help streamline access to this information.  It is also an honor to be selected to help to inform the citizenry; there are few responsibilities more important."

You may view the press release here.

Vote For NewsGator's New "Office"

NewsGator is going to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference June 9-12 in Boston.

We got ourselves involved in a contest in which contestants, all companies who will be at the show, had to come up with a short video that explains what their software does. Winners get to present their products onstage at the show.

Ours is a take-off of an episode of the popular NBC comedy series The Office that shows how our social computing software quickly hooks up people and information. Shot in our offices under a tight deadline with our own employees as actors (many of whom are seen for perhaps the only time in ties and suits), it is now online, and you can help us out by voting for it.

We are up against some formidable competition, and you have to scroll down a bit to get to our video. But my modest critic's assessment is that it's pretty darned funny.

If you agree, go down just below the video and register your appreciation by giving it the highest ranking. Every vote counts. And a tip of the cap to you in advance. - Leland Rucker

Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 1

Although Facebook began as a social networking site for college students – a site where they could upload pictures of their friends and write on one another's wall – it has quickly evolved into a wildly popular social network for high school students, professionals and everyone in between, with a valuation in the billions. As its popularity has skyrocketed, users have come to realize that Facebook has several very attractive collaboration and networking attributes including:

• Rich user profiles

• Easy discovery of friends to build a social graph

• Easy creation and joining of groups

• Easy content generation

• Intuitive display of updates based on social graph

Today, many businesses are seeing employees apply these social elements of Facebook to their jobs, forming Facebook groups around work projects and job interests. Looking to take advantage of this high-level collaboration and the power of the social graph, companies are now bringing Facebook-like features behind the firewall.

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss the ways in which a Facebook-type network for the enterprise benefits both businesses and workers, and what the important distinctions are between Facebook and a social network built specifically for the enterprise, such as NewsGator's Social Sites (to get a brief summary of the latest release, here’s a brief Computerworld article that gives a good introduction). We'll cover the various aspects of social networks including the profile page, the home page, groups, news feeds, privacy features and sharing, and how these elements can support effective business communication and increased productivity.

The Facebook profile page contains information about a user that can be viewed by their friends and people in their network. Facebook users can customize their profile pages to include photos, favorite movies and books, interesting articles or videos from across the Web, and career and education history. The Facebook profile page also includes a mini-feed that shows recent activity and links to a user’s friends and groups.

Similarly, NewsGator Social Sites’ profile page contains information about a user that people in their company can tap into in order to get a sense of who they are and with whom and what they're working on.  

 

The Social Sites profile page includes a person’s photo, interests, work and education history, work communities, favorite subscriptions, and clipped articles.  The profile page also shows the user’s most recent activity within the company’s intranet/portal (i.e. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).  And notably, although the page is customizable, much of the content is automatically generated through a user's daily authoring, tagging and reading, so he or she doesn't have to update information constantly. When users are given easy access to information about what someone in a certain role is reading, what they're interested in and what they've done most recently on SharePoint, further connections and collaborative relationships happen effortlessly.

One of our clients, CME Federal Credit Union, provides banking services to 26,000 members from multiple branches located throughout Ohio. With a highly distributed workforce, it was often difficult for CME’s branch personnel to find and connect with other employees. CME implemented Social Sites profile pages to facilitate collaboration and make it easier for branch employees to find subject matter experts.  This enterprise application of social networks, combined with other social computing features, enabled CME to improve productivity and realize a time savings of 30 minutes per day per employee.

The bottom line is that social networks in the enterprise enable people to find one another through shared connections and interests that they otherwise wouldn't know they had in common. And when minds come together to tackle a common problem, the business benefit is great indeed.

Didja Hear About our New Application for OpenSocial?

The blogosphere (and the mainstream media) has been buzzing about Google's new OpenSocial platform. OpenSocial is a programming model in which developers get a set of common APIs to which they can write against and then distribute their applications across multiple Web sites and applications. It is Google's latest, and most significant foray into social computing. The APIs haven't been released to the public yet, but NewsGator was invited to be one of the early developers in the program. This morning, we announced our first application for OpenSocial, called Didja Hear!?.

Didja Hear!? leverages our feed database and the editorial controls of our Widget Framework to present the images and videos that are most compelling and enjoyable for users to pass on to their friends.

An example of how this works within the Orkut (Google's social networking application) environment is shown to the right.  As Brian Kellner, our VP of Products , notes on the Enterprise RSS Blog, Didja Hear!? is kind of the Web 2.0 equivalent of a water-cooler chat with a great conversation starter. We recommend content across a lot of different  categories like movies, music, sports, celebrities, television, and gadgets. Users them send them on to friends or reply to videos and podcasts shared by their friends.

We're leveraging our database of nearly two million feeds and seven million articles per day to select great content, and we leverage the user's social network to highlight the content that is most compelling to them.

This is another illustration of how our core RSS platform can be extended to provide powerful services beyond RSS aggregation. Included in that list is our recent Social Sites (for Microsoft SharePoint Server) release and our NewsFriends (for Facebook) application.

We'll keep you posted as to when you can get your hands on Didja Hear!?. In the meantime, here are some links to stories that provide additional perspective:

Mashable: NewsGator Joins OpenSocial
Between the Lines: OpenSocial Developers Speak Out
GigaOm: OpenSocial, Google's Answer to Facebook

Technorati Tags: didja hear!?, rss, NewsGator, Web 2.0, Social Networking, OpenSocial
 

Three Upcoming Webinars

As the weather starts cooling off and everyone's nose is back to the grindstone until Thanksgiving, why not take a break from the daily routine and get a jump-start on thinking about the Web 2.0 projects you want to tackle later this year and early next year? NewsGator can help!

We have three FREE Webinars scheduled over the next 10 days that will be of interest to the regular readers of the NewsGator Daily. If you can't make the scheduled time, go ahead and register anyway and we'll send you a link to the archived version after the event. Note: All Webinars are one-hour long and run from 2-3 PM EDT.

• Friday, Sep. 21st, "Improving Internal Communications with RSS" (Features Shel Holtz, a well-known consultant, blogger, author and speaker, who is sure to entertain. I've also created some very hilarious tongue-in-cheek videos that are worth the price of admission)
• Wednesday, Sep. 26th, "Widgets and the Future of Advertising" (Features NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston and Mark Silva, the Founder and Principal of Real Branding. Even if you are thinking about widgets for non-advertising purposes, you'll want to catch this event"
  
• Thursday, Sep. 27th, "RSS, Blogs and Wikis in the Workplace" (My counterpart at SocialText, Jeff Brainard and I are teaming up on this event and we'll discuss the benefits of thinking about solutions that address the content (blogs and wikis) and the delivery vehicle (RSS) together.

If none of these float your boat, you can see a full list of upcoming and archived Webinars by going to our Webinar page.

New Webinar: Widgets and the Future of Advertising

Busy day here at NewsGator. In addition to our NewsGator Mobile for iPhone release and yesterday's NewsGator-Forrester SharePoint Webinar post, we have another exciting announcement to blog about- a Webinar called Widgets and the Future of Advertising. While we have been getting a lot of press lately for NewsGator Enterprise Server and our family of individual-use readers, our Widget Framework (part of NewsGator Syndication Services) is powering next-generation advertising strategies for leading brands such as Discovery, Media General, MacWorld and CBS News. All of those and more are available on our new showcase site- www.newsgatorwidgets.com.

On August 1st at 2:00 EDT, Rafat Ali, Editor-in-chief of Paidcontent.org and JB Holston, President and CEO of NewsGator, will be discussing why media companies are increasingly turning to widgets to capitalize on the explosion of social media sites. They will highlight the evolving and exciting opportunities around this technology and will discuss how print, broadcast and other online media firms can leverage widgets and other social media tools to dramatically extend their brands and drive new revenue channels.

You can sign-up for the free Webinar here. If can't make that time, go ahead and sign-up anyway and we'll send you a link to the archived version.

Technorati Tags: NewsGator, Social Media, Widgets

See NewsGator at Enterprise 2.0 Boston

For those of you planning to attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston next week, NewsGator will be there in full force and we encourage you to stop by and see us. In addition to having a booth in the demo pavillion (#3),we'll be part of several different panels and sessions. They include:

6/19 - 2:30 PM: Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies of Excellence Part I (Dave Carter from iUpload and I will be talking about our deployment at Nortwestern Mutual)
6/19 - 2:30 PM: Driving User Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies (Greg Reinacker will be participating along with our SuiteTwo colleagues from Socialtext, Six Apart and Spikesource)
6/20 - 8:00 AM: Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies of Excellence Part II (Maria Barnum will be talking about her use of NGES)
6/20- 1:15 PM: RSS: The Plumbing for Enterprise 2.0 (Brian Stern will give a quick overview of RSS and NGES).

We look forward to seeing everyone at the event.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0

New Webinar on 5/23: Internal Comms 2.0

Calling all internal communications professionals! We have a new Webinar called "Internal Comms 2.0: Understanding the RSS and Social Software Revolution" on Wednesday, May 23rd at 2:00 EDT. I will the moderator of this Webinar and panel discussion and we'll be hearing from three distinguished guests:

Jeff Treem, Senior Analyst, Change and Employee Engagement Group, Edelman Worldwide

William Hayes, Director of Library Services, Biogen Idec

Dave Carter, Founder and CTO, iUpload

Ragan Communications, which has a great set of resources, publications and programs for communications professionals, is the sponsor of this event and has helped to promote it. At last count, more than 600 people had signed up, a reflection of the fact that organizations have increasingly turned to RSS and other Enterprise 2.0 tools to help them improve the way the communicate to and engage with their employees.

If you are a communications professional, I would strongly encourage you to attend this event or watch the archived version, which will be available later that afternoon. If you are in the IT or emerging technologies side of your organization, feel free to point your internal comms counterparts over to the registration page. Everyone who attends or watches the archived version will get free copies of two very useful studies and toolkits from Ragan and Edelman.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Internal+Communications, social+software, ragan

A Busy Day at NewsGator!

For those of you used to very frequent posts in this blog, April was unusually quiet. However, May is starting off with a bang. We have a lot of exciting items to talk about including NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0, new customers for our business offerings, a brand new Web site and a new Webinar.

Let's start with NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0. Version 1.0 of this award-winning product came out 19 months ago and we released four "point" versions over the last year. NGES 2.0 is the most significant update we've had and is designed to become the foundation for large companies Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. The release is chock-full of new features, but there are four categories in particular that I want to highlight. They include:

• New Ajax Interface- The Web reader is faster and more powerful, thanks to a drag-and-drop Ajax interface. We also added options for displaying and sorting feeds
• Collaboration and Relevancy- We've added the ability to tag posts, sort by tags and discover tagged articles through a tag cloud. We also included a relevancy engine allowing users to see which articles and feeds are are most important to them or their peers
• Feed Reading Options- Giving people the most ways to access feeds has always been a differentiator for us and we go even further adding support for NewsGator Go! (Blackberry and Windows Mobile)NewsGator Desktop (pop-up notifier), Lotus Notes (6.5 and higher) and Lotus Sametime 7.5.
• SharePoint 2007- Many of our largest customers and prospects are adopting Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as their departmental or enterprise portal and we help them extend that capability through our "Site News" Web Part, which brings updated, relevant feeds into MOSS. We also leverage MOSS as a publishing platform by taking RSS feeds from MOSS and distributing them to the other feed-reading locations

The new Web reader (both UI and relevancy/collaboration features), the new feed reading clients (BlackBerry in particular) and the SharePoint integration have been especially well received. There are a lot of other features including a new reporting interface, but you can read about those in the release, but everyone we have shown the product to has been extremely excited.

Next let's talk about Adoption of NewsGator Products by Businesses. More than a 100 companies, a majority of them being Fortune 1000 companies or highly recognizable brands, have purchased NewsGator Enterprise Server and NewsGator Private Label Platform. Some of the new ones include Biogen Idec, Willis Re, Woman's Day and a couple of newspapers that are owned by the New York Times Regional Media Group.  That list also includes some companies we can't mention including Fortune 100 banks, defense contractors, entertainment and media conglomerates and semiconductor manufacturers. We'll be talking more about them in this blog in the future, but in the meantime, you can read about them what they are doing with NGES and NewsGator Private Label Platform.

Next up, we have a brand new Web site. It's been over a year since our last redesign and the focus of the new site was to better delineate our products for individuals from our products for businesses. The home page is a little cleaner, navigation is clearer and we added a lot of interactivity in the interior sections. Finally, we're eating our own dog food here and the news components on the site are all powered by the NewsGator Widget Framework (a.k.a Buzz) that is part of the Private Label Platform. We would appreciate any feedback you have regarding the new site.

Last, but not least, we have a new Webinar to mention. It's called "Increasing Portal Usage and Value with RSS" and it features Brian Kellner from NewsGator and Steve Todd from Microsoft. If you are a portal administrators, portal developer or a marketer responsible for putting content on a portal, this free, one-hour event is absolutely worth your time You can sign up here.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, portal,

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