Interesting case study of NewsGator's SaaS-based offering. While this type of scale may not be necessary within an enterprise per se - it does illustrate how such platforms should be approached as a core infrastructure decision. With only three enterprise-class vendors in this space (Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator), I remain amazed at how poorly large vendors (e.g., IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) understand feed syndication and continue to treat it as an application decision. Stunning.
Solution Overview
Customer Size: 65 employees
Organization Profile
Based in Denver, Colorado, NewsGator Technologies develops and markets solutions for the aggregation and viewing of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.
Business Situation
NewsGator needed to enhance the relational database infrastructure it uses to support 2.5 billion RSS articles totaling 4 terabytes, as part of its RSS aggregation and custom delivery solutions.
Solution
NewsGator is upgrading to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database software running on the Windows Server® for 64-Bit Systems operating system.
Benefits
- High availability with Database Mirroring
- Reduced backup storage needs with Backup Compression
- Better control with Resource Governor
- Scalability
- Easier data management
Hardware
- Dell PowerEdge server computers with 4-way, 64-bit, dual-core processors and 32 GB of RAM
Software and Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Windows Server 2008Vertical Industries
IT ServicesCountry/Region
United States
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.
-LL
Posted by: Lawrence Liu | March 16, 2008 at 01:14 AM
Mike - I'm trying to help get enterprise feed syndication on the radar by organising an Enterprise RSS Day of Action... see http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/
Posted by: James Dellow | March 18, 2008 at 06:11 AM
James - it looks like a solid effort. While we tend to focus on the tools (blogs, wikis, tags/bookmarks) - the underlying feed syndication platform pulls it all together. It is a critical middleware decision - perhaps the most important one out of all the various Web 2.0/E2.0 tools.
Posted by: Mike Gotta | March 18, 2008 at 09:22 AM