Dear K-Loggers,



This is an expansion on yesterdays post to the group.  It reflects my

thinking on how to extend K-Logging to include much of the functionality

currently be touted by expensive corporate portal solutions.  Further, given

its decentralized organic approach, it is much more likely to result in

usage and success.



Here is how to build an RSS digital dashboard using your K-Log tool (I am

using Manila and Radio as examples).  The concept is simple.  In addition to

getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain

machine generated data from corporate systems.  Sales data, financial data,

supply data, data from partner systems, data from suppliers, etc.  Using

this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple

applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard.



So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company.  I

want to track information available to me from multiple corporate

applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each app on my

desktop.  I only want the data.  So, in order to offer employees better

access to data, the IT department is convinced to spend a couple of days to

create granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP, financial,

etc.).  Here is what the feed could look like:



Sale:  Customer name:  Proctor and Gamble,  Date:  June 12, 2002, Amount:

$2.3 m,  Made by:  Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@..., K-Log:

http://tdurst.widget.com ,  Product: Widget XYZ



Using Radio I merely subscribe to the feeds I want to monitor form a list on

the Intranet (using the news subscription page).  Every hour I get all the

latest data from each of the apps.  Further, I can take any of this data,

add an annotation/comment/POV, and publish it to my K-Log.  Sweet.  I could

also create published views of this data using the Multi-author tool (

http://radio.userland.com/multiAuthorWeblogTool ) for Radio (this tool lets

me select the feeds I want to group and publish them to category specific

weblog).



Manila works in a similar fashion.  I can publish feeds I want to subscribe

to using a simple macro.  Using Manila, create a new page for your site (a

story), place the macro below in the "source view" of the editing box.  Here

is the macro:



{viewRssBox

("http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/rdf",

boxTitle:"Nanotech News", align:"center", width:200,

frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#ADD8E6",

titleBarColor:"#FFFFFF", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST",

hspace:0, vspace:0, maxItems:20)}



Note:  replace the URL for the RSS feed I have in the above macro with the

feed you want to monitor, change the name, hit post and presto.  You now

have a page on your site with the data from the RSS feed.  In fact, using

Manila you could build a complete portal of aggregated newsfeeds without

much technical knowledge.



If I was really motivated, I could use Radio's outliner to build a directory

( http://radio.outliners.com/directoryOutliner ) of views of aggregated

feeds.



Digital dashboards should be something anybody can create, customize, and

control.  Don't let your IT department launch into a multi-million $$

universal application portal when a simple approach like this could be

accomplished in days for short dollars.



Sincerely,

John Robb

http://jrobb.userland.com

--- In klogs@y..., "John Robb" <jrobb@u...> wrote:

> So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500

company.  I

> want to track information available to me from multiple corporate

> applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each

app on my

> desktop.  I only want the data.  So, in order to offer employees

better

> access to data, the IT department is convinced to spend a couple of

days to

> create granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP,

financial,

> etc.).  Here is what the feed could look like:

>

> Sale:  Customer name:  Proctor and Gamble,  Date:  June 12, 2002,

Amount:

> $2.3 m,  Made by:  Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@w..., K-Log:

> http://tdurst.widget.com ,  Product: Widget XYZ

>



John,



A bee-yootiful example... This is exactly the sort of thing we've been

doing in the call centre space for about a year.



Inspired by your recent posts on the subject, I put screenshots and

some more comments on my weblog today, at

http://www.skippingdot.net/2002/06/13



The core of it is this: we've put a scheduling engine and a SQL query

interface together to allow users -- IT users, analysts, not the

end-user / reader -- to write and schedule SQL queries on any ODBC

datasource in the enterprise.



The query results are formatted into two text strings, which become

the <title> and <description> elements of an <item>

in a Fetch RSS <channel>.



I'll try to add the screenshot to the Photos section here on Groups

too.



Take care,



Shane McChesney

http://www.fetchserver.com

--- In klogs@y..., "John Robb" <jrobb@u...> wrote:

> The concept is simple.  In addition to

> getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can

> contain machine generated data from corporate systems.



It's great to watch this kind of integration begin to take off. One

of the features of our recently-launched knowledgebase app

(http://www.kbnow.com) is the ability to generate RSS feeds out of

queries to the kb. The original idea was that you can use a kb to

store hr policies, customer kudos, etc. and then use the RSS to

expose the "10 most recent additions" or whatever on an intranet

homepage.



When you start to get other data into the game as well, and add in

fexible feed consumers, things really begin to click. Wicked!



---S



----

Sean Nolan

Software Poetry

sean@...

http://www.softwarepoetry.com

425-497-8924