As some of you may recall, The Portable Consultant is presently assisting with the implementation of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System for a Canadian financial company. The vendor has now been selected and the project PM is scheduling the vendor’s training courses. One of the course descriptions mentions management of “content subscription” and the PM asked me what this was.

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As it turns out, the course description may be referring to the system of email alerts sent out when there are changes to content in the repository to which a user has “subscribed”. Being immersed in Web 2.0 and related technologies, however, I immediately launched into a presentation of RSS subscriptions complete with a demo of FeedReader and descriptions of the benefits of RSS for updating staff and partners via intranet and extranet RSS feeds.

Of course, the ECM vendor does have full support for RSS too. So my explanation wasn’t wasted, but I have been struck by how little people in the general IT world do know about RSS. Our project is sponsored by the company’s Sales & Marketing group and they also know nothing of RSS. For my client the benefits of RSS are simple to explain… a radically simple suggestion, actually.

Since my professional life is in perfect synch with the podcasts I listen to on my daily commutes, I recalled that the February 13th. episode of Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central Podcast contained a pointer to Why Do You Care About RSSÂ by Sue Polinsky. Check out the comments below the article for more useful links.

Cheers,
-pmh