RSS Case Study Proves Successful. Case Study: Triple Point Technology, Inc.
“Triple Point's information has traditionally been stored in individual mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook. But as the organization is growing, users are realizing that email is not necessarily the best communication mechanism for critical information which must be regularly updated, distributed, and archived. Corporate knowledge tied up in Outlook and Exchange is difficult to find, difficult to search, and generally not available to all users who need access to the information in a convenient way….
The solution was multi-fold: weblogs were created for employees to publish to, business systems were modified to leverage RSS, intranet sites now notify via RSS, and NewsGator delivers the content to the desktops….
Multiple groups within Triple Point are now using weblogs. The development teams use them to post frequently asked questions, design documentation, daily test results, status reports, and other information. With a mixture of individual and project weblogs, the information tends to categorize itself, and others can easily subscribe to the portions they care about. The sales force is also using weblogs to keep abreast of prospects, processes, and general questions and answers, promoting quick and seamless communication across the entire team.
With these weblogs and NewsGator, Triple Point is changing the way they communicate internally. 'People produce local, private content in email and send it to a select few. Often it may be the wrong select few. We're trying to change that,' says Allie. 'Publish globally, via weblogs, but still read locally, via Outlook and NewsGator….'
NewsGator's short learning curve, convenience, and ease of use has been a boon for Triple Point. 'We started enhancing our systems to work with RSS in September 2002, and used stand-alone news aggregators on the desktops,' says Allie. 'By February 2003 less than 5% of potential users were reading these feeds regularly.' Triple Point switched to NewsGator in March 2003, and within two months saw adoption increase to about 35%. 'The key for us is the tight integration with Outlook – the stand-alone tools never became popular with our users.' ” [via Library Stuff]
Hopefully SLS and its sister Library Systems involved in the NEWS (News Exchange Web Service) grant will have our own case study to publish by the end of the year. I believe news aggregators do need to be embedded in other tools for maximum efficiency within an organization, but we're going to embed ours in the publishing system itself, which in turn will also serve as our intranet plus extranet.
This way, an employee's personal aggregator will be accessible remotely, from home, work, or at a conference. It will plug directly into the blogging component to make re-publishing that much easier. We had a grant meeting last week and discussed the various ways we're already thinking of sharing information inter- and intra-System. I think everyone involved is starting to “get it,” although I'm sure the full RSS cloud is still pretty fuzzy for some.
Keep an eye on us, because we're going to revolutionize the way Illinois Library Systems communicate! 
[The Shifted Librarian]