by Rainer Volz
Today a different form of project communication. An alternative to e-mail.
Something that is ideal to publish information to many recipients: RSS.
The scenario: e-mail is probably the most used communication medium in projects.
It is used for a variety of tasks, from personal, one-to-one communication,
for which it was once invented, to automated mass-notifications of project
events. Due to the low cost and general availability of the medium a lot of
different use cases for e-mail have been developed.
Despite, or better because, this popularity e-mail users experience more and
more problems with their favourite medium. Problem number one is the sheer
volume of mails. Since different kinds of information with widely differing
levels of importance use the same channel to reach their recipient, it is
hard for the user to find the information that is most relevant at the moment.
This problem is not new, and there are several approaches to deal with this
situation, mainly based on sorting mails into folders using varying criteria.
Problem number two is SPAM ; unwelcome, unrequested advertising or worse.
Spam adds considerably to the number of mails and makes the sorting more difficult.
It adds to the costs and efforts too, since you'll probably need a spam filter
to get rid of most of these unwanted mails before they even reach your mail
program.
Problem three is the fact that there are probably a lot of e-mail discussion
lists, and a large number of them are probably not important for the tasks
at hand, but you keep them anyway, because subscribing/un-subscribing takes
time. The main problem here is not so much that these mailings are unwanted,
the problem is that their usage is inconvenient, both for the sender and the
recipient. The recipient must maintain a repository of subscribed users and
maintain the mailing service, and the mailing list users have to subscribe
and un-subscribe each time they are interested/disinterested in the content
provided.
Problem four: mail formats are intended for human consumption, it is not easy
to process the contents of mails, e.g. change notifications for project deliverables,
automatically.
How can RSS help us here? As promised in the first few lines of this article,
it can be used to reduce the number of e-mails and to process information
material or notifications, we are interested in, in an efficient and automated
way. RSS has additonally the advantage that related costs are relatively low
and it is much more convenient than mailing lists. How does this wonder happen?
Explaining first what RSS is will make my claims a bit more plausible. RSS
is a XML file format for the automated distribution and processing of information.
RSS was invented for the distribution of news headlines of various Internet
portals (then called Rich Site Summary, hence RSS). At that time a RSS file
contained little more than the 10-15 most recent news headlines, combined
with the links to the full stories. The nice bit here was that other Internet
sites that were interested in the headlines could get the RSS file (via normal
file transfer, FTP or HTTP) and display the headlines/links on their site.
Many group-oriented Internet sites used this mechanism to provide their users
with news from other sites. They combined the RSS files (AKA feeds) from different
web sites with related topics and so created an aggregated overview of relevant
news.
During the evolution of Weblogs (see Project
Weblogs for more information about weblogs) RSS was developed further.
Many weblog applications provide parallel publication of the content, in HTML
and RSS. Whenever a user updates a weblog, the RSS feed is updated as well.
Today the feeds are not longer restricted to headlines, they can contain more
information, even HTML-formatted information. Meanwhile there are thousands
of interesting weblogs, with private or business character, and it would be
difficult to monitor all the interesting web sites manually. Even for project
management there are more sites than I could visit daily. So it is quite handy
that I can use their RSS feeds to be kept updated about new material.
How to use RSS feeds? With a RSS reader, a RSS aggregator. There are lots
of different applications available, free or commercial, stand-alone or integrated
with browsers and e-mail applications. The usage pattern is simple. The user
enters the Internet address of the feeds she wants to read (e.g, the RSS feed
for the PM World Today Weblog and PM Clarion, which publishes the PMWT highlights.
The RSS application transfers the files to the user's machine and processes
and displays the content. The display is similar to the one provided by e-mail
programs and news readers.
Before we look again at the problem areas we identified at the beginning,
one word about possible applications of RSS in a project context. If you use
weblogs for project communication, RSS is the mechanism to be kept updated
about changes in the weblogs of interest. You don't have to visit their weblog
every day, you don't need to receive e-mails to know what is going on, you
just look into your RSS reader and read only the really interesting posts
on their web sites. Especially useful if you are working in several projects
at the same time, or in geographically distributed teams, where there is not
so much direct contact.
Another use case would be to couple RSS with systems that provide information
project members are interested in. Examples are version control systems, such
as MS Source Safe or CVS, where changes to the repository are logged in a
RSS feed. Similar functionality would be appropriate for the notifications
many web-based project rooms provide for the users. Instead of having these
mailed to everybody, the changes could also be collected in a RSS feed. Everybody
interested in a particular set of notifications or repository changes could
then subscribe to the relevant RSS feeds. The usage pattern on the client
side would be the same as before, only the generation of the feeds is different
to weblogs.
The generation of RSS feeds is relatively simple, there are numerous libraries
for the popular scripting languages, as well as Java, C# and others available
to create such feeds; which only means to create a specifically formatted
file from source material, in most cases probably a database. The resulting
RSS files are published by normal web servers, which also provide the standard
mechanisms for encryption and access control, if required. So if you don't
want to wait for vendors to provide RSS feeds - which will happen soon - you
could also do it yourself for your project. Since RSS reuses most of the existing
technology infrastructure of projects it is also a relatively cheap way to
provide an alternative communication channel.
Now back to our four problems. How could the usage of RSS help us there? Problem
four was about the processing of incoming messages. In contrast to e-mail
RSS is a format designed for automated processing. The RSS formats are XML-based
and extensible. There are several RSS modules available to create an RSS feed
that contains the right kind of information. Additionally, you could use your
own fields or whole modules, if required. While the standard modules can be
processed and displayed by most available RSS readers, non-standard fields
would require customised clients or flexible RSS readers like NewsGator,
which can be configured to process new fields or modules. (See link at the
end of this column for more.)
Problem three was about convenience and effort. As described the RSS way of
publishing information differs from e-mail. There is no central mailing list
administration necessary. Publishing information just means generation and
deployment of the RSS file on the web server. The users themselves can define
if, when, and how they want to access the provided feeds. A change in interest
on the user side means just adding or deleting a feed address in the reader
application. Less effort and more convenience on both sides.
Problem two dealt with SPAM. Since the users pull the RSS information from
the server there is no e-mail address that must be published to outside people.
Nothing where unrequested e-mail can be sent to. One way to reduce these mails.
Last but not least the total volume of incoming mails. If you are able to
use RSS feeds in the way described you got already rid of many purely informational
messages (mailing lists, discussion forums, notifications) in your mailbox.
They are not gone, they are now in the RSS reader. But ideally the mailbox
is now reserved for the more important one-to-one conversations, while the
public discussions are in the RSS reader, where they are either read by you,
processed by your scripts or other applications, or simply being replaced
by more recent content, if you aren't interested in it at the moment.
One remark: In my own experience this approach doesn't really reduce the total
amount of information you "process" daily, just the number of e-mails.
Since RSS makes it easier to handle lots of information, in- and outside of
projects, I tend to search for more interesting stuff ! What it really does
is to help to put the information at the right place and to process it more
efficiently than with e-mail.
Two links for the curious: my
overview RSS - abridged version provides more details and further links
about RSS. Here I created also another page that provides an example for the
generation of a custom RSS feed and its processing with flexible RSS clients
like NewsGator.
copyright® 2003 Rainer Volz
Follow Rainer Volz's Web-based PM Groupware discussion through his previous PM World Today Viewpoints Columns.
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