When NewsGator, the leading RSS (Really Simple Syndication) company, was founded four years ago, its founder and CTO Greg Reinacker was convinced that Microsoft® Outlook® was the application most busy professionals spent time using every single day. In fact, NewsGator built the company around the idea that viewing RSS feeds through a folder in Outlook would be the most efficient way to consume information. By leveraging Microsoft technologies such as the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server™, NewsGator was able to create its robust RSS platform in less time—speeding time-to-market by nearly 35 percent.
Today, Newsgator Inbox 2.6, formerly Newsgator Outlook Edition, is the latest evolution in the company’s mission to make it as easy as possible to find, deliver, and read relevant information anytime, anywhere. (RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. News, information, enterprise applications and blogs can all be published in RSS.)
An Evolving Product Strategy
According to Todd Berkowitz, NewsGator’s Director of Marketing, “We got our start with the Outlook reader. We were selling them not only to individuals but also into small, medium and large organizations and providing multiple copies for customers. In response, we created a product called NewsGator Enterprise Server, which lets companies take a more centralized approach to managing feeds and managing subscriptions. This product enables users to automatically subscribe users or groups (even people that aren’t familiar with RSS) to relevant feeds—from within their Outlook folder, Web site, a SharePoint® portal or even mobile device.“
NewsGator’s Enterprise Server, announced in October 2005, aggregates, reads, and distributes RSS content (internal, external and premium) within the enterprise. It essentially brings the power of NewsGator’s robust RSS platform behind the firewall, providing enterprise class security, manageability, and deployment. With its powerful search, collaboration, and administrative capabilities, it allows organizations to ensure that relevant information gets delivered directly to the enterprise. In addition, it integrates with Microsoft Exchange Active Directory® and other LDAP servers, easing deployment for enterprise IT departments and providing a wide variety of user-friendly interfaces for employees.
NewsGator released NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand in early 2007, a software-as-a-service version of NewsGator Enterprise Server. The service is targeted at small- to mid-sized businesses (SMB) as well as divisions or groups of larger organizations who want the ability to improve the way they find and distribute news and information without having to deploy or manage an on-premise solution. This solution delivers the benefits of Enterprise RSS, without the requirement of deploying or managing hardware and software, something critical for small-to-medium businesses or departments without IT resources
This product is the latest addition to NewsGator’s award-winning family of Enterprise RSS solutions. Featured in eWeek’s January 15th cover story, “RSS in the Enterprise,” the company’s server-based product, NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), has been deployed by more than 70 organizations worldwide, including more than a dozen Fortune 100 companies such as Procter and Gamble, Bank of America, and Rohm and Haas
According to Cindy Callan, IT Process Analyst at Rohm and Haas, “Before NewsGator, we were really facing information overload, with no centralized location for us to share that information. NewsGator has given us a strategic, easy-to-use delivery system that ensures our employees will actually read the information we provide for them, making them far more productive and informed.”
In addition, the company offers other solutions as well. Through the NewsGator Private Label Platform, it helps media companies, publishers, and content providers use a widget framework to increase audience engagement page views through the delivery of interesting content within their brand. Properties such as USA Today, Newsweek, Discovery Network and the Denver Post leverage the NewsGator Private Label Platform. In fact, Newsweek.com recently launched My Newsweek RSS Aggregator powered by NewsGator.
According to Kevin Stuart, audience development manager of Newsweek.com, “Adding RSS aggregation to Newsweek.com brings a new dimension of customization to our site. The NewsGator Hosted Solution allowed us to customize the offering based on criteria that was important to us, and gives us great flexibility to rapidly augment, modify, or edit the content we make available to our users.”
And according to NewsGator’s President and CEO J.B. Holston, this product addressed an increasing marketplace need. “Media consumers are demanding customization, immediacy, and multi-channel access from content providers,“ says Holston, “My Newsweek is a prime example of how media companies can satisfy those demands by leveraging RSS to enrich their readers’ online experience.”
Microsoft-Centric Focus
Berkowitz says several things differentiate its service.
First, it has the broadest platform of choices for people to really subscribe and read their RSS feeds, adding that “We really run the gamut from every conceivable device. We come out with new ones all the time such as screensavers and a desktop sync agent with IE7. So we’re about giving people a choice about how they want to consume these feeds. They can look at it within Outlook, or on their Windows Mobile® device, or on the web, on a dedicated desktop reader and we make sure that it’s all synchronized, so articles read once in one place, are marked as read elsewhere.”
Second, key point of differentiation for Newsgator is its focus on the enterprise itself. In fact, Newsgator says that organizations across a variety of industries are realizing the tangible benefits of managing the distribution of content with an enterprise-class RSS platform. It says that Web 2.0 technologies, including RSS, are being adopted to improve information dissemination and collaboration within organizations.
The third key differentiator is NewsGator’s tie in with the Microsoft platform. According to Berkowitz, “We’re tightly integrated with everything from Outlook to SharePoint to Exchange, so on the enterprise product, in addition to having an Outlook plug-in, we give people the option of going directly through Exchange. There’s no need to download anything or put it on the client desktop. We’re also very integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) so people or groups within a SharePoint Team Site can view their feeds in that environment and also leverage MOSS as a publishing platform and view feeds created there on their other NGES interfaces. That’s something nobody else is doing. And from an enterprise perspective, Windows is the only thing we’re using.”
Newsgator says its early decision to leverage Microsoft turned out to be a great move, and it has continued to tap Microsoft technologies, such as the .NET framework and Windows Server. But just as important as the technology and platform tools, Newsgator has worked closely with the Microsoft Emerging Business team. EBT has been instrumental in making early introductions to product teams and groups, relationships that turned out to be instrumental in NewsGator’s product development and future success.
Says Berkowitz, “The ability to constantly push the envelope and come out with new readers or aggregators for other devices or for other business use cases is pretty important to us. And we can only do that by innovating and by innovating quickly—we need full support from Microsoft to do that.”
He adds, “All of our product development teams get new versions of products out the door in as little as a few weeks, I mean, it’s a pretty amazing pace of innovation. And it’s something I haven’t seen at other companies. I think it’s attributable to Microsoft and the familiarity that our programmers and developers have with the tools.”
Synchronizing with Microsoft Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, NewsGator is working closely with Microsoft to help make RSS better and easier for both individual users and application developers and to further encourage mainstream adoption. This relationship is part of Microsoft’s effort to help bring the power of RSS to applications running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista™. During demonstrations at the Microsoft MIX06 event in March 2006, NewsGator and Microsoft showed how a user could subscribe to an RSS feed from Internet Explorer 7, sync and view items from the feed in NewsGator online, sync from NewsGator Online to NewsGator’s NetNewsWire Mac-based reader, and then see the feed list through a preview of the upcoming NewsGator Windows Mobile Reader.
“With Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft is exposing the power of RSS to hundreds of millions of developers, individual and enterprise users across the world,” says Reinacker, Founder and CTO of NewsGator. “Through our relationship with Microsoft and our synchronization capabilities, we can extend the benefits of RSS to a range of devices and platforms, giving the user full control of how and when they view their RSS feeds, while at the same time utilizing the strengths of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.”
According to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explore team at Microsoft, “Incorporating rich support for RSS into the Windows platform is a key initiative because RSS represents the future of how people will find, consume and distribute content. Microsoft and NewsGator are working together to create a richer experience for consumers, enterprises and developers by making RSS easier to use across the desktop, the Web and mobile devices.”
NewsGator and the RSS Future
NewsGator Online has more than one and half million feeds in its index and archives more than one million articles per hour during peak times. Its platform receives nearly 10 million API requests on an average day and more than one million users are signed up for its consumer products. With more than 70 enterprise customers, including ten of the Fortune 100 companies using its enterprise RSS aggregation and distribution platform, the company is growing quickly.
Since its founding in 2003, NewsGator has captured the RSS trend, thanks to its industry-leading technology and rapid deployment of key RSS-related initiatives. It has received back-to-back honors on the E-Content Magazine’s annual listing of the top 100 companies that define the digital content industry. In 2006, it was chosen by AlwaysOn Network as one of the top 100 private companies and a trend-setter by KM World magazine. NewsGator Enterprise Server was named as a 2007 Technology of the Year by InfoWorld.
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© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, Outlook, SharePoint, SQL Server, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, Vista and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Document published May 2007.
