Attensa

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 and KnowNow on RSS in the Enterprise Podcast

Charlie Wood interviewed Matthew Bookspan, Attensa's Director of Product Management and KnowNow's CTO Ron Rasmussen for his first podcast. It’s solid overview on the state of the enterprise RSS market, how companies are using RSS and the road ahead.

The audio makes everyone sound like they are in a Warner Brother’s cartoon but stick with it.

 You can listen here.

10 Business Wiki Applications

Brian Keairnes at the StartupSpot has compiled a very practical list of business wiki applications covering sales, marketing, research, customer service, product planning and more.

The Growth in RSS - The Fire Hose is Getting Connected

Jupiter Research has a report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS" by Greg Dowling. Currently 29 percent of large companies ($50 million + in annual revenues) publish content via RSS. That number is projected to jump to 63% by the end of 2006. That's just six months away.

The report's recommendation's include, "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."

If you're one of the companies making the move to RSS, talk to us about lowering the barrier for feed management and deployment while helping users control the flow of the inevitable RSS fire hose. It's what Attensa is all about.

Track Sales Leads and Opportunities in Attensa for Outlook

Sales professionals can now track Salesforce.com leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents, and support cases in Outlook using Attensa for Outlook and Spanning Salesforce from Charlie Wood's Spanning Partners.

With Spanning Salesforce you can subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds to stay on top of their most important CRM information without logging into Salesforce.

Spanning Salesforce is available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Six Apart and Attensa - Business Blogging Seminar

Attensa is partnering with Six Apart on the Business Blogging Seminar series. Six Apart makes world-class blogging software, including Movable Type and TypePad. Their tools have helped 75% of Fortune 500 companies start blogging and allowed these them to minimize their technological overhead.

Together we’ll be talking about how combining the power or blogs and RSS can

• improve customer loyalty
• turn customers into an extended sales force
• help you save money on marketing
• position your company as a thought leader
• improve internal and external communication practices
• get the right information -- to the right people -- at the right time

Speakers include:

• Anil Dash: Chief Evangelist, Six Apart
• D.L. Byron: Blog Business Summit  / Boeing Case Study
• Brian Mulvaney, Director of RSS Platform Marketing, Attensa

The first seminar is in  San Franciso on April 20th  and it's sold out! Look for upcoming seminars in New York and LA

Portland --From Stumptown to RSSville?

I spent a lot of time over the past few days looking at the other Syndicate exhibitors and I realized Portland companies made up a sizable percentage of the vendors hawking their wares, sharing the love and spreading the RSS gospel at the conference.

In addition to Attensa, Janet Johnson was working the Marqui marketing magic. Charles Smith, from Pheedo was mixing it up and Jon Maroney and Scott Rogers were waving the flag for FreeRange.

With four out of the 19 Syndicate exhibitors from Stumptown, there's more than just coffee brewing in Portland.

Call to Attention

As we continue the development of an RSS network based on attention streams to intelligently improve the relevance of information for everyone using RSS, our mantra is Less is more.

Brain power and energy are being devoted to the development of the Attention.xml spec through Dave Sifry and the brain trust at Technorati. We think it is just as important to start bringing consumers and businesses into the loop on how RSS and attention can deliver on the Less is More promise. Even the passionate and eloquent voice of Steve Gillmor can't don't it alone.

Craig Barnes, our CEO, has issued a call to action to establish an industry initiative to evangelize the inherent benefits of artfully using attention data to drive RSS to the next level.

If you or your company want to join us in this noble effort, send me an email.