There is already quite an arsenal of collaborative enterprise solutions one can choose from to offload the ubiquitous use of email. A recent article in eWeek is now touting RSS as another possible cure to “email malaise”.

I do agree that RSS feeds are a great way to remove the clutter such as mailing list subscriptions and other mass mailings from your inbox and the inclusion of RSS support in the latest Outlook and Notes clients will certainly ease enterprise adoption. However, there are some caveats to consider before blindly endorsing RSS.

As the article points out, the network bandwidth impact can become quite considerable and is often underestimated. The p2p nature of this technology makes management and usage tracking difficult. The convenience of RSS integration into the email client will come with a price.

I myself switched many of my email subscriptions to automated feeds and love how I don’t need to deal with organizing these mail messages into separate folders anymore. While I used mail rules to automate that process, many users still do this by hand. The side effect of manual review is that people may rethink the need for a particular subscription. The set-and-forget nature of RSS feeds will eliminate that pain and compound the problem of over subscription. Let’s admit it, we are all information pack-rats.

Not unlike the quiet introduction of public IM for business use, RSS is one of those next gen technologies that has already entered the corporate network and IT, sooner or later, will have to deal with it. As these feeds become part of the email storage infrastructure, companies will need to review their mailbox quotas and review the possible impact on regulatory archiving requirements.

No doubt, RSS will have a place in enterprise collaboration, preferably tightly integrated with some of the other great tools such as intranets, wikis and portals.

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