How Should I Use RSS In My Enterprise?

How should I use RSS in my enterprise? I am an administrator for a large school district (295 schools) and am tired of e-mail for communication. I am sold on the use of RSS and would like to know your opinion regarding using RSS for this endeavor and what obstacles and/or pitfalls I should prepare for.

It really depends on what aspects of e-mail communication you’re wanting to replace. For example, RSS is no replacement for person-to-person e-mail.

However, it’s a great way to publish and broadcast information.

For example (and I’m making some huge assumptions here), you might publish administrative bulletins or news via RSS that are picked up by individual schools or individuals within the schools. Schools might publish news, schedules, what-have-you via RSS to be picked up by parents, teachers, and even students.

Heck… teachers could even publish their class assignments via RSS.

There are two parts to the approach: publication and reception.

To publish an RSS feed, the easiest way is probably to set up some kind of blogging software. I’m a big fan of MovableType, but there are literally hundreds of alternatives that can do the job. The nice side effect of using this as the publication means is that it actually hides the fact that there’s an RSS feed involved at all to the authors… to them it’s just online publishing.

The good news also is that, as needed, access to both the resulting Web pages (if you even choose to expose them) and the feeds can be password protected. Most RSS readers do support basic authentication associated with feeds. For example, you might want to keep your administrative feeds from being easily readable by students.

And that does bring us to readers. Whomever you’re targeting with these feeds will need an RSS reader or aggregator of some sort, and like publishing platforms, there are many. If your district has standardized on Outlook, for example, then newsgator is a great solution. If you need a standalone reader, the FeedDemon is nice. There are also Web-based aggregators if the feeds are publicly accessible on the Internet - portals like Yahoo! do a nice job in this arena.

But regardless of the tool, your recipients will need one. And that might just be the biggest hurdle of all… it’s another tool that everyone will have to get comfortable with.

But I think it’s fantastic way to streamline much of what I expect your communication needs might be.

Related:
Ask Leo! - So just what is RSS, and why should I care?
Ask Leo! - What rights do I retain when I publish an RSS feed?