Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Oracle WebCenter and Fusion Middleware 11g

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle's analyst summit in mid-June provided a good look at their plans for Fusion Middleware 11g and WebCenter (released July 1st for download; see summary of features here).  Now that we're out of non-disclosure mode (and into "please disclose!" mode) I'd like to share my high-level impressions.  They covered a ton of stuff, but my view is biased towards my coverage area of portals with connections to search, productivity, and collaboration. Other Burton Group analysts were also in attendance from our Identity and Privacy Strategies team and our Application Platform Strategies team (see Anne Thomas Manes' thoughts here).

First, although Oracle owns 4 portal products, all the portal-related time was spent on WebCenter. Sure, other portals were mentioned in bullets as examples of how they can plug in (or consume WebCenter's social software), but it was clear WebCenter is the leading actor here (and supporting actor in the stories of the SOA, identity, and enterprise application teams). This confirms what I (and Oracle) has been saying: that WebCenter is the primary portal and that the other 3 (Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction née Plumtree) will be supported and have their die-hard fans but will not be best for new portal projects.

It was helpful to hear Oracle frame its collaboration/portal/search/productivity/social software ambitions in relation to Microsoft SharePoint.  For all its plusses and minuses, SharePoint provides a common point of reference against which to measure.  They described how they line up with SharePoint as an alternative, can coexist with it, and where they surpass it.  This is what IBM should have done with Quickr+Connections at Lotusphere.

As with SharePoint, WebCenter provides an impressive set of functions in one box. There is often better integration between WebCenter and other Oracle assets (like their applications and development tools) than Microsoft where other groups can sometimes get away with ignoring what the SharePoint and Office group does.

There are numerous SharePoint analogies in WebCenter.  From conversations with the execs there I found that some are intentional and in other cases they say SharePoint copied them (well, copied AquaLogic User Interaction)!

• Business Dictionary as a role based catalog of information assets. Seems like SharePoint's Business Data Catalog.  This should be an interesting battle since SharePoint's BDC is clearly a version 1.0 work-in-progress and Oracle has a lot of expertise to bring here being a database company at heart.
• Federated search. 'Nuff said.
• Office integration. Clients I speak with expect Microsoft will always have the best Office integration, but there are cases where Microsoft's internal silos or some good ideas can expose openings.  Oracle showed a nice Word sidebar for document management that had people, versions, etc.
• Slide sorter. This was a neat feature that SharePoint offered, but Oracle's version seems to leapfrog it. They demoed picking all the slides for a sales deck. Oracle calls this a "folio" or compound document. Oracle acquired a neat little company called "Outside In" that has sophisticated filters for productivity files.  Blending this into Web Center can provide for some good Office integration.

Oracle did a fine job of acknowledging the need to work with SharePoint and others.  But the meat boils down to their WSRP producer running on .NET, selective metadata consumption, and Ensemble (a reverse proxy solution).  Hopefully this gets beefed up with more programmatic integration, discovery tools, and guidance so it requires less reliance on WSRP.

Of all the competitors, WebCenter is the newest architecture from the ground up.  Being the youngest has its advantages.  Since WebCenter is newly architected it feels like it more seamlessly integrates new concepts like tagging, linking, social connections, and REST services than IBM and MSFT where it's more bolted on. So they're better at utilizing these features across the suite that Microsoft and a little bit better than IBM.

But will Oracle - the whole company - give WebCenter the resources it needs to win the marketplace(not just the resources required to be a good and useful product)?  In the Q&A session, Oracle President Charles Phillips said there are "No plans to have middleware broken out in reporting. We have lots of product lines, we're getting more with Sun... " This hits at the perennial knock on Oracle's efforts around knowledge infrastructure - lack of push and commitment.  Oracle did talk about how much revenue Fusion pulled in, the growth rate, penetration, etc.  That would indicate the company would have to care.  But still, Microsoft manages to report on four breakouts (Client, Server and Tools, Online Services Business, Microsoft Business Division, Entertainment and Devices Division).  Oracle sticks to two (Applications, Database and Middleware).  Sun will add at least one more (servers and hardware).  If Oracle is dedicated to the enormous space between enterprise apps and the database, breaking out middleware from the database would be a great way to track and prove this commitment.

Catalyst pre-conference workshop agenda - Project Concordia

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Another option for those wishing to leverage attendance at Catalyst (on top of all the great Burton Group workshops, sessions, guest speakers, etc). Alice Wang and I will be exploring the intersection between identity and social networking during the workshop below:

Use Cases Driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT

We will hold a pre-conference workshop at the Burton Catalyst North America 2009 conference on Monday, 27 July 2009, from 10am to 5pm, in San Diego, California. Participate in this working session as end users, deployers and technology providers discuss identity-based use cases reflecting the intersection of traditional enterprise with Web 2.0 and SaaS, models with consumer underpinnings that are turning traditional IT approaches inside-out. The group will problem-solve together to discover and define:

• Different styles of provisioning/federating identities
• Privacy concerns around unmanaged employee usage of outside tools
• Security and policy approaches to address virtualization and the cloud
• Authorization models that combine flexible access to resources with appropriate administrative controls

In Concordia workshops, real-world use cases rule: we work together to understand trends and requirements, and then facilitate effective results in future technology development and harmonization. We have gathered use case presentation and discussion proposals, detailed below, in order to form the workshop agenda.

Registering to attend

It is free to attend this Concordia workshop; you just have to let us know you're coming. You can do this by adding your name to the list below or by sending mail to Britta Glade (britta at projectliberty.org).

If you are also planning to attend the Burton Catalyst conference taking place during the rest of the week, you can get a fantastic Catalyst discount for attending this workshop! Use the code concordia when registering on the [Catalyst site to get a full-conference price of $1,295 (this is an almost 50% discount for non-Burton Group clients who would normally pay $2,495 to attend).

Catalyst pre-conference workshop agenda - Project Concordia

Burton Group @ Enterprise 2.0

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Next week is the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, taking place at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel in Boston’s Seaport district. Both Mike Gotta and I have been involved with the Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board for a number of years and will also be speaking at the conference. Here is a quick run-down of our scheduled sessions:

Monday, June 22

• 1:00pm – 4:45pm :  “Reality 2.0: Getting Started With Enterprise Social Networking” – A half-day workshop, taught by Mike Gotta, that will provide an interactive forum for people to learn what other organizations are doing with social networking.

Tuesday, June 23

• 1:00pm – 2:00pm : “Is Email the Next Killer SaaS App?” - In this session, Larry Cannell will describe how a high-stakes competitive SaaS e-mail market is emerging to offer cost-effective options for enterprises.

• 2:15pm – 3:15pm : “Socializing Enterprise Portals” - In this session, Mike Gotta will moderate a lively discussion with leading portal providers after brief presentations from each vendor.

Wednesday, June 24

• 9:15am – 10:00am : “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise” – Mike Gotta will be a panelist participating in a “free-wheeling discussion” looking into the challenges and opportunities for using social messaging within enterprises (Burton Group alum Irwin Lazar moderating).

• 2:15pm – 3:15pm : “Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment” - In this panel session, Mike Gotta will moderate a discussion with practitioners involved in social networking projects.

Thursday, June 25

• 8:30am – 9:15am : “Reality 2.0: Enterprise Social Networks (A Field Research Study)” - Mike Gotta will be sharing the findings of a field research project that interviewed over 60 people representing 21 large enterprise organizations on the topic of social networking within the enterprise.

• 10:45am – 11:45am : “Is Enterprise Search Ripe for Open Source Disruption?” - In this panel session, Larry Cannell will moderate a discussion with enterprise search experts involved in both open source and commercial search products.

The rest of the agenda looks excellent. It’s going to be a busy week. If you are attending, please stop by and say hello!

This Month In Collaborative Thinking

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Some recent posts on Collaborative Thinking. Follow the citation links to read the full article(s):

For Those Caught In The Wave...

There is a great deal of "irrational exuberance" about Google Wave in the news right now given its current state (pre-beta). While prognostications on how it will derail existing solutions make for good press coverage, such statements should be viewed as part of the natural enthusiasm when something creative and innovative comes along.  This is a ways off... 

IBM Plugging Holes In Connections/SharePoint Integration

...Despite this plug-in, I still believe IBM has made a fundamental and perhaps unrecoverable competitive mistake by not being radically more aggressive regarding SharePoint integration. The window for IBM to have entrenched itself in "SharePoint shops" for social computing is just about closed in my opinion given that Microsoft will begin talking about the next version in greater detail later this year.

Saba Social Left Out Of IBM Deal

...However, there are some nuances in the deal. The focus of the partnership is between Saba's platform and IBM's WebSphere platform, not the Lotus software stack. Specifically, there was no mention of what the deal means in terms of Lotus Connections and Saba Social.

Persistent Group Chat in Office Communications Server R2

In August, 2007 Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Parlano. Parlano's leading product, MindAllign, delivered "persistent group chat". After the acquisition was completed, Microsoft has kept quiet on exactly how it would adapt Parlano's technology and deliver it as part of Office Communications Server (OCS). With OCS R2 launched in February 2009 that mystery has been resolved...

Oracle Beehive 1.5: Still A Work-In-Progress

Oracle makes the case the collaboration has been fragmented across three major domains (Enterprise Messaging, Team Collaboration, and Synchronous Collaboration). This has resulted in tools being deployed that are more costly for organizations to deploy and maintain from an infrastructure and operations perspective. At least that's the argument. There are some key points to consider however (for a brief analysis of Beehive, read the full post):

Enterprise Twitter: Fad Or Tipping Point

Blogger: Mike Gotta

If you are a Burton Group client, just a reminder of the TeleBriefing available to you this week. Below are the possible topics and discussion areas we'll cover:

Business Topics

• Why are these tools relevant? What capabilities are driving interest from enterprise strategists?
• Who is the “buyer” (business and/or the IT organization)
• Solutions: general conversation and community-building vs. specific applications
• Business case, ROI, and metrics
• Legal, compliance, and security issues

Technology Topics

• Platform architecture
• SaaS and/or on-premises (appliance)
• Alignment with unified communications (e.g., instant messaging, mobile)
• Integration with existing enterprise infrastructure (e.g., identity, security)
• Integration with enterprise content management (e.g., e-Discovery, compliance)

Organizational Topics

• User experience (and the influence of Twitter)
• Cultural issues / barriers
• Behavior change and social messaging adoption
• Community & social networking dynamics

Futures

• How do these tools evolve?

TeleBriefing Description

Social messaging, sometimes referred to as micro-blogging, has become incredibly popular on the Internet, exemplified by soaring use of consumer services such as Twitter. Twitter’s growing audience has raised questions as to whether such communication models are applicable within the enterprise. Strategists are considering social messaging as a means to improve not only information sharing and collaboration but also facilitate social networking and community building. There are concerns however. How does social messaging conflict with ongoing unified communications efforts (e.g., instant messaging)? What level of security and compliance requirements are there for these tools? Join Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group, along with CEO Tim Young of Socialcast and CEO David Sacks of Yammer as they discuss all of these topics and address questions from audience participants.

Presented by: Mike Gotta, Tim Young CEO Socialcast, David Sacks CEO Yammer

Dates:

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC GMT/20:00 CEST

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
9:00 a.m. EDT/6:00 a.m. PDT/13:00 UTC GMT/15:00 CEST

Social Media Tail Chasing

Blogger: Larry Cannell

First it was Paul Boultin at Wired saying “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004” and now Steve Gillmor is telling us “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.” A couple of years from now the next big thing will obsolete Twitter and so on, and so on. For an IT strategist these are the types of headlines that give you heartburn. Not only because they are trashing an existing technology (that you may be trying to justify) but because it hypes a new “next big thing.”

From a journalist’s perspective I suppose they are correct. For Boultin maybe the blogosphere is getting a little crowded:

“Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.”

But, do you think the 70+ million blogs are all competing for attention on stories about Barack Obama? Not a chance. Many of these people could care less about building an audience that competes with Wikipedia or Politico and are simply sharing ideas with people who have similar interests or ideas.

It’s a little more difficult to understand Gillmor’s reasoning about the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter. He points to RSS feeds that do not carry the full text of a blog post as something that “carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news.” Gillmor then goes on to wax poetic (seriously, he quotes Bob Dylan) about the “race for realtime” where Twitter can get news out quicker than an RSS feed. Well, OK, for a journalist I suppose realtime news is important. But does it make that much difference if you read feedback about the latest Obama news conference a few hours later?

I am not saying any of these technologies are bad or that the next big thing isn’t, well, the next big thing. But excitement for many of these emerging social tools can start building from these same journalists. As an IT professional, what can you do with this social media tail chasing? First, you can be skeptical of anything that is over hyped (or anything that is totally trashed) as much as these technologies have been. Second, you need to stay focused on understanding your enterprise’s needs better than anyone else. Only then can you truly assess whether the next big thing can make a difference.

By the way, my report “Making Smart Choices for Online Workplaces” was recently published. It provides a framework and approach for assessing how these and other technologies can improve online work environments and knowledgebases. I’ll also be talking about this subject at Catalyst North America in July. I hope to see you there!

What Microsoft Office 14 Needs: A New, Separate SKU

Blogger: Craig Roth

Recently I posted some guesses as to what features Microsoft will put into Office 14's content creation tools (the productivity suite consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote).  But those were guesses about what Microsoft would do, not what they could do or should do. 

There's a lot of interest in O14 since professional pundits (and swivel-chair pundits in fuzzy cubicles everywhere) want to speculate about whether the 800 pound gorilla known as Microsoft Office can be brought down by plucky upstarts like Google or Zoho, or free options like OpenOffice or IBM Symphony. But this speculation is misplaced.  I start the NextGen authoring section of my content creation seminar with a prediction:

If Microsoft is ever dethroned in the content creation market, it will not be because they were beat on features or marketing … it will be because of a fundamental shift in the content creation market for which they failed to adapt.

In other words, it is not Vendor X that will beat them by being cheaper or more feature rich.  It's Suite X that will beat them with a different set of technologies that addresses a unique but growing subset of content creators.  There is a fundamental shift in how content is being created.  It has bubbled up from old concepts such as collaborative editing and been picked up by web 2.0 and its Gen Y adherents who think in rapidly produced, hyperlinked, searchable content chunks instead of ponderous, static, e-mailed documents. I introduced the NextGen content creation trends here (with further description here).  This is how I see the content creation environment today:

Note that I chose to visualize this as a central core being expanded by these new needs rather than a versioning depiction such as 1.0 ---> 2.0.  That's because the core needs will always exist in enterprises, but we need to acknowledge a new set of needs that is not well met by the core authoring tools and that will account for an increasing percentage of content creation as Gen Y'ers enter the workforce and information workers get used to authoring in new ways via blogs and wikis.

We are at an inflection point in the way content is being created.  Microsoft would be unwise to pass up this opportunity to segment the market.  Microsoft may be able to get through one more major version of Office by stretching traditional document-related technology to fit.  But this anchors their attempts to address new content creation needs to a 1990's document-centric mindset.  By carving out a new target market, they build incremental revenue (most buyers of this suite would still have needs for core Office as well), plant the seeds for a new franchise that would be small but grow more rapidly than Office, and compete better with innovative vendors that are unencumbered by entrenched bureaucracy and sunk costs.  And all while helping to mitigate the bloat and complexity of Office by separating out features that will be unused or confusing for many core Office users. There's a chance that this would cannibalize Office 14 upgrades, but my instinct is that it would make no or a minor short term loss (since the new target market is small) and pay for itself within the next two versions of Office. It could be rolled out on half-cycles with Office to help avoid cannibalization and steady the famously spiky revenue stream and attention that Office releases garner.

Accordingly, I argue that Microsoft should create a new product (a SKU in industry parlance) for the NextGen content tools rather than continually trying to bolt onto Office Pro.  It could be called Office Extended, although some more thinking would elicit a more clever term.  Here's how I would start:

• OneNote would shift over to anchor the new suite.  With new branding and development, it can finally stand up as a new type of content platform that allows for content components, real-time collaborative authoring, and improved linking rather than just being a productivity add-on aimed at students and meeting notes.  OneNote will only be truly understood to represent a different paradigm when it breaks the chain it has to the Office Home and Student suite
• The Live Writer blogging tool would finally get a real home here
• Microsoft would have a place to create a real wiki rather than the SharePoint template that stands in as the official "Microsoft wiki" for lack of anything better.  No one - not even SharePoint folks - asserts that SharePoint's wikis are in the league of any best of breed tools, and I can't think why Microsoft would not want to compete for a best of breed wiki any less than they want to have a best of breed browser.  And remember the pain that being too slow to recognize a "good enough" 80/20 browser wasn't enough caused them.
• Microsoft would take an 80/20 swipe at the XML content creation market with a new Xmetal-like tool, much as they grabbed a new low end of the records management market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

And that's just a start.  Part of the idea is to give this new market segment a new matching suite to grow with.  This idea fits Microsoft's software+services direction since a few of these products (wikis and blogs) are not purely client-based, so services are needed.  I guarantee the evolution of content creation is not over, so the new SKU provides a place with plenty of room to stretch and grow new creation mechanisms the market demands without having to add a 14th pound of flour to the 10 pound bag of Office.

Component-Oriented Authoring: The Journey Begins with the First Step

Blogger: Craig Roth

I highly recommend an eWeek series by Eric Severson on component-based authoring (see part 1, part 2, part 3).  Eric notes how the content creation tools that came of age in the 1980's are becoming an anachronism in today's world of expectations for searchable, fresh information.  New  content creation technologies such as blogs, wikis, and easily updatable website are often a better fit for these new needs.

Eric makes a great case for why component-oriented authoring is needed.  But he explores the more well-trodden path of technical and product documentation.  While this does encompass the current sweet spot for component-oriented content creation (and vendors and service providers that implement XML-based content and DITA), I find it more interesting to explore how the sweet spot is expanding.  Technical writers know they are professional authors.  But when does this start hitting the average information worker who doesn't think of herself as a professional writer, but in fact writing underpins a large amount of what she does?

That question leads to another: Who addresses the gap between the current XML content creation tools (which require significant setup of schemas by people experienced in XML or training on DITA) and the current productivity tools (like Word, where "anything goes")?  Within that gap lie "lightly structured" or "occasionally structured" documents that are partially unstructured but contain reusable and tagged components in places.

I recently did some research on component-based authoring for my overview "Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age" (non-clients can see a summary of the NextGen Content Creation trends here).  Microsoft folks demonstrated to me how Word can be stretched to cover this space with a bit of programming and some slightly awkward UI.  And JustSystems XMeTaL folks described how their tool could be stretched to cover documents with less structure by creating a custom schema.  But you'd still have a separation of authoring, formatting, and publishing that makes sense in large scale, but is onerous at small scale content production.  It's not an XMeTaL issue - the same applies to other XML authoring tools generally used in structured content creation environments such as Altova XMLSpy, Arbortext Editor, BroadVision QuickSilver, PTC Arbortext, and Stylus Studio.

Until the bridge in the middle is built, a few content authors will continue to fly from the unstructured to structured worlds, but the mass of authors will struggle to make do with their existing tools while waiting for an easier way to take that first semi-structured step in a longer journey.

Open Source Software Licensing for IT Managers

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent article from Bruce Perens, a leading open source advocate, entitled “How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?” reminded me of how confusing open source licensing can be for IT managers who aren’t plugged into the open source world. Although the article is published on a website intended to be read by IT managers it was clearly written for companies producing open source software. After writing down some of my own ideas for explaining open source licenses to IT managers I decided to turn these into a series of posts.

But first, some background. My research focuses on the use of communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) solutions within large enterprises. What this means is I don’t come to this topic from only a developer’s or a system or network administrator’s perspective. The 3C solutions we cover are usually considered infrastructure components that can be leveraged by applications. We tend to have a foot in both the infrastructure and application side of IT.

What we see driving IT management interest in open source is:

1. Saving money through lower licensing costs.
2. A desire to tap into innovative solutions, particularly those driven by active open source communities.
3. Using open source software to learn about emerging technologies (for example, much of what is called Web 2.0 was first built with open source)

The concerns IT managers have with open source software are:

• How well does the software work?
• Will it integrate with my existing infrastructure and applications?
• How well is it supported?
• Is it secure?
• Are there any risks with using open source software?

In my client dialogues about open source a topic that often drives discussion is licensing. One of the keys to effectively applying open source solutions is to understand a vendor’s business model and the role the software plays in their market plans. An open source license supports that role and business model. Therefore, understanding open source licenses is important because:

• They are an indication of the business model used by an open source company (and commercial software and services companies using open source software).
• Each of these business models has a different set of factors to pay attention to in terms of how they use open source and what they must do to succeed.
• They also influence how an enterprise might use an open source product. For example, maybe you are using an open source library in one of your applications or perhaps you are using a full product (like an open source blog) but are thinking of integrating it with an application. Each of these scenarios comes with a different set of opportunities and risk.

My next post will be an introduction to specific open source licenses, the levers they can bring to bear on a software market, and what they can mean to an enterprise using open source software.

Secured RSS versus E-mail

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent post on Samuel Driessen’s blog posed a question sent in by Peter Verhoeven regarding the use of secured RSS feeds in enterprise RSS products such as Newsgator or Attensa (secured RSS feeds require a the user to be authenticated in some way, often with a username and password). Peter is working on a project to consolidate RSS feeds, reduce network bandwidth, and enable collaboration to take place around them.

The problem is secured RSS feeds have challenges that are not obvious when using RSS feeds from unsecured sites (like a public news site or a blog, like this website). Peter reports that Newsgator has capabilities to handle secured RSS feeds, but are implemented in a way that is unsatisfactory. Attensa’s handling of secured RSS seems broken in many ways (read the post for more details).

RSS, Not Just For Blogs

Often times people assume the source of RSS feeds can only be content sites, like blogs. However, RSS can be generated from any application, including enterprise applications. So, when RSS feeds are secured it can be dangerous for an aggregator to make assumptions about the feed.

Here is a key point about secured RSS feeds: the same RSS feed URL can produce a different list of feed items based on the identity of the requesting user. For example, assume a CRM system produces an RSS feed. Persons "A" and "B" both have access to the CRM system but cannot perform the same functions. "A" can look at all outstanding leads. "B" can as well, but is also able to see all closed deals. Therefore, if the CRM system uses the same feed URL "A" will not see some items that "B" does (closed deals). Clearly, this is a very different scenario then monitoring a blog for new posts.

So, the reason secured feeds should not be easily shared is because they may contain different feed items per user. Secured RSS feeds can also be personalized RSS feeds.

This doesn’t have to be a difficult concept to understand if you strip away some of the mystique which can be assigned to RSS feeds. Ignore the fact that RSS feeds are formatted in a special way (or course, they are in RSS format). Instead, think of them as simply web pages served up by a web server (which may be fed by an application generating the web page). They are also accessible using http. So the only difference between an RSS feed and a web page is the format of the text (one is html, the other is RSS).

In the example above the CRM system is producing a different RSS feed based on the identity of the user. This is no different than the behavior of the same CRM system when it is used interactively as an application. But, instead of producing a different page of html per user, the secured RSS feed produces a different list of RSS feed items.

Secure RSS Feeds Are Personalized For You

The most obvious difference between unsecured and secured RSS feeds (besides requiring authentication) is that secured feeds can be personalized. So if we start thinking about scenarios where an enterprise application provides different RSS feed items per user some interesting scenarios come to mind. An obvious use is notifications; maybe a part as been released to manufacturing, a payment has been made, or some other event happens that the application feels is important enough that you should be notified.

Today, these notifications are usually sent via e-mail. In some cases these messages occur infrequently enough that the user notices them in their inbox. But, it may also be the case that these messages overwhelm the user who then simply turns them off or ignores them.

Another Option

In the case where numerous notifications are overwhelming inboxes, an option to consider is an RSS feed consumed by a “river of news” aggregator (this assumes, of course, the application can produce an RSS feed). For example, the Google Desktop Web Clips gadget monitors multiple RSS feeds and displays new items in a sidebar on a desktop display. It also happens to support Windows single sign-on which means it doesn’t need to store a username and password for secured feeds, if the application providing the secured RSS feed also supports Windows single sign-on.

The “river of news” aggregation model assumes that if the reader misses some items it isn’t a big deal but one of them may catch their attention. So, imagine having a stream of updates coming from enterprise applications showing up in a sidebar. Although there may still be an overwhelming number of notifications coming they no longer clog up the inbox and the person monitoring these may be satisfied knowing messages are flowing at an expected rate.

I’m sure there are many options that could consume secured RSS feeds and present them to individuals or teams in useful ways. If you have an interesting example please share it below.

Update: Greg Reinacker posted a response and says NewsGator Enterprise Server 3.x will implement a feature that will address Peter's issue with secured feeds.