The issue of information overload is growing in importance. People are getting more and more information via different sources – RSS being one of them. You probably use it to get feeds from blogs, news and other internet sources. Actually, RSS technology is very scalable and, in my view, can be used by PLM systems to delivery information to the right people. Forrester researched the space of RSS usage inside enterprises – indeed RSS can aggregate content and distribute it to PLM system users. What I like in this type of solution is that information can be delivered to internal and external (value chain) users in the same way, using an RSS feed.
Conclusion: In the world of Web 2.0 and PLM 2.0, the usage of RSS feeds to distribute information can solve problems of data flow and information delivery. RSS is still not adopted by all users. What I found surprising is that there are also not that many software vendors providing an RSS solution for enterprises. An example of an existing solution is the company called NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com/). This company- provides a solution to boost collaboration and improve social communities in your enterprise. So, the solution is relatively simple and available – you can try to use it with your PLM system. I expect that there may be some existing PLM providers who can support RSS as part of the standard collaboration functionality.
