Moving Beyond Outlook to Social Networks, Enterprise 2.0, and More
Chew on this: RSS feeds and social media tools are more than a trend, they have become a phenomena all their own, and NewsGator is playing a key role. Founded in 2003, the company believed that Microsoft Outlook was the application most busy professionals spent time using every single day, so the company built its first solution around the Outlook reader. Turned out to be a good strategy, since RSS “really jumped in popularity like we hoped it would,” says NewsGator Founder and CTO Greg Reinacker. Moving beyond its first product, the Outlook Plug-In (now called NewsGator Inbox), NewsGator now offers solutions that help individuals and businesses improve the way they find information and communicate internally and externally.
The Microsoft Connection?
Reinacker says, “It started really, really early. Prior to NewsGator, I ran a consulting company. We did Windows Server development—and I believe we built some of the first commercial Web services using the Microsoft .NET Framework—so I was pretty invested in working with Microsoft. And then the light bulb went off in my head—why can’t I read this RSS content inside of Outlook?”
From there, the company grew from one Outlook-based product to an online suite of products, and from there to the enterprise with NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES).
EBT (led by Don Dodge) shared Microsoft’s product roadmap and was instrumental in making early introductions for the NewsGator team to Internet Explorer and other product teams and groups. These turned out be instrumental in NewsGator’s product development and future success. The development team worked on the integration with Exchange in Microsoft test labs—testing the product with Exchange Server, conducting scalability testing and providing consulting. More recently, NewsGator worked closely with Microsoft’s SharePoint group to produce NewsGator Social Sites, announced in October 2007. This is a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and infrastructure that integrates directly with NewsGator Enterprise Server and SharePoint Server 2007’s existing architecture and security models. Social Sites works in conjunction with NGES to make SharePoint 2007 an Enterprise 2.0 destination.
Where are they now?
NewsGator and its products have won numerous awards—for instance, the company was named one of InfoWorld’s 2007 Technologies of the Year. The company now offers solutions in three distinct businesses: a consumer business that provides award-winning RSS readers for individuals (Windows, Outlook, Mac, Web and mobile); an Enterprise Server business, the flagship offering deployed by more than 70 organizations worldwide, including more than a dozen Fortune 100 companies such as Proctor and Gamble, Bank of America, and Rohm and Haas; and syndication services that help pull more content to media companies via a widget framework.
Says Reinacker, “Social software and Enterprise 2.0 are hot topics right now, and RSS plays a fundamental role in Enterprise 2.0—it forms the underlying plumbing between all the different applications. The industry is finding that RSS is essential to these architectures, and realizing that they also need an enterprise-class RSS infrastructure in place to actually make this work effectively in a large enterprise. Our product is designed to meet those needs. And the SharePoint connection is absolutely key.”
For more, read NewsGator: First News Aggregator for Outlook Keeps Getting Better.
