Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Scott over at Attensa has just posted their new suite of RSS feed readers online - these free RSS readers are available for Mac, Windows and Outlook.

For those of you who haven’t upgraded your feed readers lately, have a look at the kind of instant communication tools Attensa provides:

• Safe and Secure Subscriptions to Internal and External RSS feeds, so your IT guys will be happy - no embarrassing feed leakage!
• One click blog republishing - I no longer have to leave my news source to blog about it..
• Powerful automated persistent search tools search across 18 Web and blog search engines - it searches many available information sources, vs. plain Google or Yahoo news, etc. I’m more enlightened and aware of mentions that others may not pick up.
• Create, import and export custom reading lists (OPML files) - it’s easy to move your feeds into Attensa.
• Keep feeds and articles organized with tagging and categories. Attensa tags can now be imported and exported - so I don’t have to duplicate tags - once tagged, ubiquitously tagged.
• Easily play audio and video content directly in the River of News - again, I don’t have to leave my reader to gain complete awareness of things that interest me.

You can download Attensa’s free RSS readers for the enterprise 2.0 knowledge worker here.

And for you IT guys, you can download an evaluation version of Attensa’s Enterprise RSS server platform here.

When I was growing up in the late 60’s early 70’s, there was an adage: “Never trust anyone over 30.”

Today, I’m seeing the same group of people say “Never trust anyone under 30.”

We might not be saying it directly, but we’re certainly implying it with the fear and loathing of collaborative tools - like RSS-enabled collaboration platforms, blogs and IM - at our employees’ disposal.

In an Internetweek article covering the Office 2.0 conference last week, I was sorry to read of the following exchange among panelists:

“David Meyer of BEA, said his company’s recently launched AquaLogic Ensemble provides IT with a layer of control on top of applications like wikis, managing who can access them. “It allows the culture of participation within boundaries,” said Meyer. (my emphasis - JLJ)

But there are also cultural and generational issues that will probably require more than a technology solution.

“I hear it every week, someone saying ‘You can’t [post] that because they think it’s going to undercut their authority,” said Meyer. Schueller of P&G agreed.

“There is a generation and expectation gap,” he said. “You talk to someone whose been successful in one operating paradigm who says ‘How do I limit this information to the people who need to know’ versus someone who can’t wait to tell everyone what they just did.”

My answer to Mr. Shueller? Trust them.

Trust is almost a foreign concept to those of us who’ve been in the work world for 20 years or more. But it certainly has been tested in the past ten years - which are arguably the most formative years of our work history for people of my generation.

While many of us watched our fathers (yes, mostly our fathers) work for 30+ years at the same company while we were growing up; we quickly figured out that our lives would be very different.

Especially those of us who got into less traditional businesses early on - technology, telecom, software, energy trading and such.

We’re the ones who are now running organizations who:

• don’t provide retirement support
• have self-insurance policies in force
• consider bagels on Thursdays as a big benefit to our employees

In a truly inspired post on trust for virtual teams, Anne Truitt Zelenka actually has the audacity to prescribe collaboration tools to help build trust among knowledge workers!

I’m with Anne.

Since our inability to trust is deep seeded, we’ve got to look at tools like Attensa’s enterprise RSS platform, Kapow Technology’s mashup platform and Lotus’ Sametime to enable our employees to facilitate trust in each other where we cannot.

Limiting information, after all, flies in the face of the values we held growing up in the 60’s and 70’s…

I once heard someone say:

• a forum is a virtual water cooler
• a blog is a virtual printing press
• a wiki is a virtual white board

Like their virtual metaphors, they’re excellent point solutions, but none of them are good collaboration platforms for knowledge workers in the enterprise.

Effective enterprise collaboration platforms do the following three things for teams of 10 or 300:

1. Improve collection and capture of knowledge and attention
2. Facilitate many-to-many conversations about pressing business issues
3. Enable immediate response to business information

Good collaboration platforms have:

• The immediacy of radio or television
• The detail of newspapers or magazines
• The sustainability of billboards

Scott over at Attensa spoke at the Office 2.0 conference last week about how Attensa used the combination of Clearspace from Jive Software and Attensa’s enterprise RSS platform as their internal collaboration platform.

In doing so, Attensa cut email in the company by more than 30%.

Collaboration grew and email noise was cut because Attensa used a collaboration platform that anyone in the enterprise could use.

That’s the first essential of a good collaboration platform:

1. Usability across the general population

Clearspace uses common language and an easy to understand publishing metaphor to share information.

Which is exactly why Wikis are not good enterprise-level collaboration tools. Scott’s slide show is online here - and my favorite slide is this, which says it all:

For my readers who are not familiar with HTML, the first line is an HTML indicator of a headline (”h3“), and is wrapped (”*“) by some HTML code (”& n b s p ;“) for emphasis.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I dislike Wikis as collaboration tools for everyone… In fact, I believe Wikis are excellent tools for some pockets in organizations, especially technical teams.

They’re not, however, appropriate at all for non-HTML-savvy knowledge workers in the enterprise. Which is the preponderance of us.

Blogging software is the only tool that anyone in the enterprise can use (of the three options above).

Why? Because most blogging software hides its HTML publishing roots; and doesn’t require a boat load of patience or technical know-how in order to get up and running quickly on it…

Based on my first essential, you might think email would be a good collaboration tool, because of ubiquity, usability and adoption in the enterprise. Let me just say this, and get it out of the way:

Email is no longer a good collaboration tool.

I’m personally very email-centric in my approach to communications, but not for effective collaboration. Why?

The second essential element in a good collaboration platform:

2. The platform is time-sensitive itself, and enables immediate response

Time-sensitive information becomes stale quickly. According to the SPAM Filter Review, the average person has 3.1 email addresses to check. I’ve got 6.

If I’m not checking the right email account at the right time, I’m hosed.

In fact (and I could be ashamed to admit this, but I’m not) I’ve got 194 items in my inbox right now that I’ve read and kept in my inbox because they deserve some part of my attention.

How long do you think it’ll be before I get to each of them?

With RSS, I’m immediately alerted to information as it breaks. I know immediately when someone has responded to my question online - or has found the information I needed to get the next-step of my project done.

With Attensa’s one-click republishing, I can immediately respond to that information and post it immediately, from wherever I’m getting my answers. And (more importantly) everyone else will know my response, too.

Which brings me to my third essential quality of a good collaboration platform:

3. Anyone can choose to be informed, and everyone gains knowledge

This is where email fails. In most businesses, email is retained and treated as a corporate asset by IT. And as a business asset it’s unwieldy and largely unsearchable - unless you’re in IT or in litigation - then watch out!

In true enterprise collaboration platforms, the assets of the business are captured by- and for- the entire organization. They’re easily searched and retained in an accessible forum (no pun intended) for everyone.

And most importantly, anyone can subscribe to (and just simply listen), or participate in any business discussion that interests them.

If I want to be in on conversations about a particular issue or product, I can subscribe to their feeds. I don’t have to wait to be invited into the email thread (or roped into the email thread) based on someone else’s vision of my need to know.

Imagine the cross-training possibilities.

Imagine the ideas that might bubble up from anywhere.

Imagine the competitive information you might track - with every ear and eye and mind (that is working for the business anyway) could capture and share.

Start with one group. See how it works. Then share the knowledge across your entire organization. But do it quickly. Why wait?

I’m prepping the blogosphere this weekend for an upcoming announcement by Attensa on Tuesday, August 28.

They’re going to announce some pretty major enhancements to their enterprise 2.0 RSS platform, and a Mac reader - finally.

If you’d like a scoop, you’re welcome to contact me at janet (at) janetleejohnson.com.

I’ve got screen shots galore, a preview of the press release, a pre-release download area to try the Mac reader, a video of Attensa’s Scott Niesen demoing the new capabilities and more:

In fact, check out this screen shot from within their River of News view - you no longer have to leave your RSS reader in order to see the full effect of a site’s content, in context. (Including video!)

Attensa is a firm believer in the power of the blogosphere to push the needle on new product announcements and adoption. They’ve hired a blogger (me!) to replace a traditional PR agency, and I’ve joined forces with their SEM firm, Anvil Media, to push the envelope on discovering industry influencers. And they’ve got strong traditional media relationships as well.

Show your support for the preview. I’m prepped and happy to share news and information - ping me for more.

It’s no wonder the Mac has challenges in enterprise 2.0.

Now… I love Apple, and have for years. I got into technology in 1984 - The Year that Apple Built. I worked for Apple as a business development manager. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the platform.

So I was pretty thrilled to I walk into one of my clients and find a pretty daring environment for a non-agency business: they have both Mac and Windows-based PCs in their 60-person firm.

Most interesting to me, the Windows-based PCs came in late to the party.

But my cross-platform pain is becoming acute. It’s not like I want to slit my wrists yet; but I am sick of even graphics “standards” like JPEG not rendering correctly on my COO’s laptop when she opens PowerPoint documents I’ve created on a Mac.

It seems that in 2007 (only 23 years later) - with all the “cross-platform” products, standards and services we have at our fingertips - the damn Mac and Windows machines still have trouble communicating.

And yes, the Macs have Microsoft Office, some have Intel inside and even Windows software emulators in use; and there are Windows 2007-based PCs that can more accurately communicate (the setup can be laborious, but that’s another story) - inside the building. But the majority of Windows PCs remain on 2003 - as is the majority of the world.

Apple’s problem?

Microsoft has done a piss-poor job of cross-platform integrations of their own products for “the rest of us.” (To coin an Apple phrase from those radical 80’s.)

I know there are plenty of companies who make cross-platform applications work quite successfully today. But from a knowledge worker’s perspective, too few productivity applications have it humming across platforms yet.

The work in creating applications, tools and services that work together seamlessly in a cross-platform environment is critical.

What does it take? Two critical consistencies:

• Consistent architecture - applications make the same kinds of requests to the same resources and get the same respect. (No one will know how well this works until it doesn’t.)
• Consistent user experience - a great software engineer can make applications dance. But if the user experience is poor on any side of the cross-platform equation, knowledge workers will find non-standard workarounds.

Consistency takes patience, resources, coordination and vision. We should reward those companies who embrace a multi-platform with consistency with our attention and our business.

Our employees’ productivity will surely follow.