Friday, February 11th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Bloglines Behind the Firewall
The NewsGator folks reveal their future product plans:
Dino could be characterized as “NewsGator Enterprise Server”, for lack of a better name. Imagine NewsGator Online, picked up and installed on a server behind a corporate firewall. Imagine it also (optionally) connecting with Active Directory and Exchange server. No longer would a system administrator need to go install NewsGator Outlook edition on 3000 desktops; rather, with Dino, they could install a single server, make some configuration choices, and employees will just get “more stuff” somewhere in their Exchange mailbox without having to install anything on their own machines. Outlook; Outlook Web Access; Blackberry; Exchange ActiveSync; all of this is enabled by the Dino/Exchange integration.
Not using Exchange? Not a problem. Dino will have a version of NewsGator Online’s web-based aggregator (also also mobile edition, email edition, and media center edition). Many potential customers have asked us about an intranet-based aggregation solution, and Dino fills the bill for this as well.
As I’ve noted before, behind-the-firewall aggregators are a gapping hole in the Enterprise Blogs/RSS/Wiki feature set.
They also say this, alluding to integrating with/pulling content from other info-streams in the enterprise:
And with sophisticated indexing capabilities, and integration points with other enterprise systems, Dino can become a central information distribution point for all kinds of content.
That’s where I think the real, long-term gold-mine is: converting the 100’s of information sources behind the fire-wall to easy to consume/use RSS streams that can be annotated and combined with blogs and wikis. And, of course, tying it all together with Google-quality search.
There’s a whole passel of (now, at least) terribly done IA in enterprise apps, and the wikis, weblogs, aggregators, syndication, and search technologies that consumers now enjoy, applied behind-the-firewall, could quickly clean up that mess.
The technology is “simple”: it’s just data transformation and webapps. The harder part is selling that idea to both (1.) folks who’ll invest the initial cash to build out the system, and then (2.) the gold-holders in business who’ll buy the software and services.
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