RSS Makes CRM Debut

Zachary McGeary | September 15, 2005, 12:44 PM

Two announcements of note in this space.

First, Spanning Partners last month developed an RSS product, Spanning Salesforce 2.0, that integrates with Salesforce. Any Salesforce Enterprise user can subscribe to the feeds, which deliver information to users such as new leads through a user's RSS reader of choice.

Second, Microsoft yesterday announced at PDC the availability of RSS in their 3.0 CRM product. One of the interesting differentiators in the promotion of these two products is the capability to deliver sales information to partners, not necessarily MS CRM end-users themselves.

Salesforce hasn't announced plans to incorporate their own RSS functionality into their product, but Microsoft's move in to the space may spark some competition.

We've still yet to see much of a push for consumer-oriented RSS functionality. Some things i'd like to see are delivery of (targeted) updated knowledge base content, updated order and delivery information and of course updated service request information. Perhaps the biggest inhibitor to the deployment of such solutions is RSS reader penetration among Interenet users, currently only at 12 percent of internet users.