Building A Robust Feed Syndication Platform (Part 2)

Lawrence was kind enough to respond to my earlier post on the infrastructure NewsGator has put together to build out its feed syndication platform. I mentioned that I remain amazed at how poorly large vendors (e.g., IBM, Microsoft) are responding to this strategic middleware/infrastructure requirement that large enterprise customers will need as part of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 efforts.

I stand by that statement.

Regarding Microsoft, I would refer people to this post where I summarize its efforts "Microsoft Announces FeedSync But Its Strategy Remains Un-Sync'd". It is true that Microsoft has implemented RSS support quite broadly throughout SharePoint. The important point business and IT decision makers is that the implementation is more application-like than infrastructure-like. Microsoft does little to nothing concerning the need to manage feeds from an end-to-end perspective (thus the partnership with NewsGator). Additionally, Microsoft needs to be much more clear on where it will be implementing Atom and AtomPub within SharePoint. The continued support only for RSS is architecturally a dead-end and reflects a poor upstream design decision.

Regarding IBM, they are almost as bad. There is no cohesive strategy coming from IBM concerning a feed syndication platform either. They do support RSS and Atom (in fact, IBM has been very aggressive with Atom/AtomPub and it is well implemented within Lotus Connections). But overall, its implementation of XML feeds across its product portfolio (e.g., Lotus Notes/Domino, Connections, Mashups) still does not meet the requirements of a feed syndication platform (as represented in the market by Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator). There is some work being done that appears to be under-the-radar. At Lotusphere, IBM demonstrated a possible feed syndication platform in its Innovation Lab. There is also some interesting work being done by some IBM'ers around Abdera. Still, there is no clear product roadmap message from IBM regarding a feed syndication platform that could be deployed at the middleware layer. It also (like Microsoft), implements this capability as part of a product capability (which is more application-like than infrastructure-like).

Lawrence Liu
Senior Technical Product Manager for Community and Social Computing
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

We (the SharePoint team) understand feed syndication just fine, which is why we have RSS feeds for practically everything in SharePoint, and the feeds are easily configurable by the end user if necessary. SharePoint also has a built-in RSS Viewer web part to consume RSS feeds. As for feed aggregation, management, and sharing, we were hoping that the Exchange team would build that, but they had other priorities. NewsGator has been and will continue to be an excellent partner for us in this area.

Collaborative Thinking: Building A Robust Feed Syndication Platform