Attensa

The ROI of Collaborating

As part of Attensa's Project Dogfood we've been using BaseCamp  and Central Desktop to manage projects and collaborate with partners. These tools definitely makes working with a distributed team easier. Both of these collaboration tools feature: milestones, to-do lists, file storage, messaging and Web feeds.

Apparently we aren't alone in experiencing the communication and collaboration benefits.

Benchmark Research recently completed a sponsored research study looking at the returns from the use of collaboration technology in the construction industry.

• 98% of collaboration technology users felt they benefited from having information held centrally
• 93% of users said there was less chance of losing important documents
• 90% said it was easier to find and retrieve their documents.

I'd add, getting project updates in a Web feed makes it easier to stay on top of progress.

 

 

Introducing Project Dogfood and Michelle's Flog Blog

There's a project at Attensa called Project Dogfood. We've set up internal wikis and blogs to help us track fast moving projects, collaborate a little more cleanly and to give everyone on the team experience applying Enterprise 2.0 tools to our real world programs and projects.

Part of the motivation for Project Dogfood comes from our work with Six Apart. After sitting through three Business Blogging seminars, you can't help get caught up in Anil Dash's enthusiasm and wanting to apply the practical pointers on approaching business blogs that flow from DL Byron.

As part of Project Dogfood, I wanted to get more people involved in telling the Attensa story. I'd like to introduce Michelle, our customer service lead and author of the Flog Blog posts. I've asked Michelle to share her knowledge of Attensa for Outlook to help people get more out of the 1.5 beta.

We'll be sharing more about our learnings from Project Dogfood as soon as I flog the next victim into blogging.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 Public Beta - RSS reader prioritizes RSS feeds based on what's important to you

At Syndicate in New York we gave a preview of Attensa for Outlook 1.5, the first version of Attensa for Outlook that uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and articles you find most interesting to the top. We said the public beta would be announced in June. We were off by about two weeks.

We are opening the public beta today and we’d like to invite you to give Attensa for Outlook a try.

Download the beta here.
You can download a getting started with 1.5 guide here
You can see screenshots here.

Attensa’s predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process RSS articles. By constantly analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to you. Feed priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of attention is processed.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 lets you choose how you want your feeds and articles presented.

Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you subscribe to.

Articles can be read in order of importance based on:

• Priority – This view uses Predictive Ranking to intelligently predict which subscriptions and articles will be most important to you at any given time.
• Favorites – Articles are displayed based on which subscriptions are read most frequently and consistently. In addition to viewing prioritized list based on AttentionStream analysis. You can manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.
• Date - This view displays articles based on the most recently updated newsfeeds.

Of course, you can also read their articles using a standard Outlook view.

If Outlook is the first application you open in the morning and the last one you close at night, you need Attensa for Outlook, the RSS reader designed for business users looking for an easy to use, secure RSS reader for Outlook that helps track and monitor critical business information… automatically.

Participate in the beta - Give and Get

Active contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the finished product.

Once you experiment with Attensa for Outlook you'll probably have suggestions for features and improvements. We've set up an Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta forum where you can post bug reports and provide feedback.