Howdy folks,

i'm wondering if someone can elighten me as to how people (could) use RSS feeds within the enterprise environment. i've come across developer blogs and demo's for things like splunk where output is provided potentially as an RSS feed. now to me RSS feeds are still little more than toys in Firefox to see the 10 last storeis on the register or various forums results on lq. implications are that critical business servers can be well reported on and monitored through the clever use of RSS feeds. but despite blogs saying "this is how to generate rss feeds with our product" i've not seen any significant dot joining to say how you'd move forward to make use of such feeds in any real way. anyone use them?

I envisage use where a small call centre wants it's staff to know the current status of the call pool. In large sites you could ditch those stupid above head signs that no-one bothers to look at and have a nice ticker running right in front of the rep.

For helpdesks you might also personalise the feed for analyst so they know their current stats vs the average. Or go real right wing on them and supply everyone's rank based on whatever.

hmm yeah, but that's still computer to human... are they not meant to be super useful in situations without humans at all?

I dont think so, I've seen people sending email reports and then developing a parser in order to communicate between systems. I think XML was made to mave a better strucutre between systems. RSS is just an open schema of this XML technology. Any parser like expat, saxon, xerces will be able to parse the XML for a better communication between systems.

I think what firefox misses is a good GUI presentation of the XML. Opera is very good in XML storing it on an internal SQLite database.

I even used python to grab static content like HTML and (syndicate it) on a MySQL backend.