NGES Technical Whitepaper

The IT Impact of Enterprise RSS A NewsGator Technical White Paper July 2006 Page 2 The IT Impact of Enterprise RSS INTRODUCTION With its rapid adoption over the course of the last three years, RSS has become the standard for delivering and syndicating content from blogs, news sites, podcasts and increasingly, internal applications. A recent survey from Pew Internet Foundation found that nearly 1 in 3 individuals consume RSS feeds in one manner or another. The RSS consumption is not limited to personal use either. A recent survey we conducted of customers of online and desktop products found that 63% of respondents subscribed to work-related RSS feeds and 86% of those who subscribed to work-related feeds spent more than 2 hours a week reading them. CIOs have started to take notice as evidenced by a CIO Insight survey from May of 2006 that found that 63% of CIOs have either deployed, are in the process of deploying, or are evaluating RSS. With the rapid growth on both the RSS publishing and consumption side, the impact on IT staff and infrastructure is significant. The dominant method of reading RSS feeds is through RSS readers, Web or client-based software that manages subscriptions, fetches new articles and delivers them in a single location for users to consume. As RSS readers proliferate around organizations, with or without the explicit knowledge and/or permissions from IT departments, their impact on bandwidth consumption, security, and most importantly, IT staff, needs to be explored. In this white paper, we examine the impact that RSS readers have on IT departments. We also discuss how NewsGator Enterprise Server, a centrally-managed and administered RSS aggregation platform, can minimize the impact to IT on a number of different fronts. THE INDIVIDUAL READER APPROACH As RSS readers were first unveiled in 2002 to subscribe to feeds from popular blogs, dozens of free or low-cost options have been available to employees. Ranging from free Web-based readers to low-cost ($50 or less) plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook® and desktop clients for PCs and Macs, these readers required little to no installation support from IT. While the Web-based readers were extremely popular with people reading feeds solely for personal enjoyment, the Outlook clients and desktop readers became popular with business users, particularly when they could get reimbursed or the company was purchasing on their behalf. Outlook-based readers were natural fits for employees who “lived” in Outlook much of the day, and the desktop readers typically offered a richer set of features, particularly for users who subscribed to large numbers of feeds. Prior to having corporative initiatives in place for RSS, blogging or Web 2.0 technologies, IT departments typically could not make deploying a standard RSS reader throughout their organization a top priority. With small numbers of readers installed by end users in usage within a given organization, the impact on infrastructure and IT staff wasn’t significant. However, as internal RSS feeds start proliferating from content management systems, enterprise applications and internal blogs and companies begin undertaking formal initiatives around Web 2.0 technologies, the Page 3 impact on IT has the potential to be much more significant. We examine that impact below from the perspective of bandwidth, security, control, and employee effectiveness. Bandwidth Consumption For Web-based readers such as NewsGator Online or Bloglines, bandwidth consumption is typically not a significant issue as the heavy lifting is done on the server-side (provider) and the browser simply retrieves an HTML page. But for Outlook plug-ins, desktop readers and browser plug-ins (Firefox, Safari and the upcoming IE7), each client has to poll each URL at specific intervals and retrieve any new posts. For externally published feeds, this is occurring through the corporate gateway to the internet, where bandwidth is the most expensive. The graphic below shows how content has to get retrieved from separately for each different reader. If only a handful of people are subscribing to feeds, it’s not a big issue. But when you get to a lot of users subscribing to a lot of feeds, it starts adding up. The example below explains this further. • Organization with 3,000 RSS readers, each subscribes to 25 feeds • The average feed has 10 posts, each of which is 2KB in size • Users can customize the settings for how often feeds are retrieved, but the default is usually every half hour Based on the above example, the maximum bandwidth consumption at any given moment would be (assuming all users were polling simultaneously) equal to: (3000 users) x (250 posts) x (2KB per post) = 1.5 GB. It is safe to assume that not everyone would be accessing feeds at the exact same time, but even at 10-20% of the traffic occurring at the same time, you would still be talking about a noticeable increase in bandwidth consumption. Security While individual readers offer the ability to deliver authenticated feeds, either internal or external, by prompting for user names and passwords or including that information in the tokens passed to the content source, they don’t have the ability to use Windows logon or single sign-on capabilities. In the case of internal feeds, this often causes extra work on the part of the support staff to assist users who don’t understand which credentials are required or have simply forgotten them. The biggest problem with secured feeds and individual client readers is that IT staffs have no way of knowing whether credentials entered into these programs are protected adequately. If a user enters a network username and password into an RSS reader on a laptop which is subsequently lost, there is a very real possibility of this compromising many Content Consumption Page 4 other systems. Microsoft chose not to deal with this issue in Internet Explorer 7 and will not be providing the capability for users to access feeds that require the storage of credentials. IT Staffing Impact While client-based RSS readers are very easy to install (a recent NewsGator Survey found more than 99% of NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire users installed their software on their own), that doesn’t mean they don’t impact IT departments from a resource standpoint. Although the early adopters of software like RSS readers tend to be technologically-savvy, IT staffs have learned through painful experience that the addition of each new program to a user workstation produces more chances for issues and support calls. If the company chooses to standardize on a particular reader and roll it out to a large number of users, this can cause a significant impact on IT departments in three areas-software support, infrastructure management, and OPML distribution. Once the software is chosen, it is the responsibility of the IT staff to ensure that it gets deployed on every machine. Even for companies with centralized software deployment solutions, a fair number of machines typically fail to install. Upgrades suffer similar challenges, and with software that is evolving as rapidly as RSS readers, IT groups should plan on one or two upgrades each year. Once the software is installed, the help desk will need to respond to support calls. Users from sales, marketing, human resources and many other departments are not going to be content with posting comments on public support forums, so they will likely look for internal support. Since RSS is new to most users, training and support can be significant if the experience is unlike prior usage or the usability of the solution has not been refined well over time. From an infrastructure management perspective, individual use readers also cause issues. We addressed the bandwidth impact in the previous section, but these problems can become severe with RSS readers making frequent requests over portions of the network that are already overtaxed. Low-bandwidth connections can quickly become saturated by repeated requests for content – especially in the case of some feeds which can contain several hundred posts. Finally, if the individual readers are part of a larger Web 2.0 strategy, the company will likely be publishing a number of internal blogs or feeds to which it will want the entire organization or a group to be subscribed. If those feeds number more than a handful, the easiest way to distribute those is through an OPML file, which can be imported as a file or linked to a URL. Ensuring that the OPML is properly loaded onto each reader will likely require work on the part of IT. As new feeds are added to the OPML file, the same process will need to be repeated. NEWSGATOR ENTERPRISE SERVER A number of companies have started to consider alternatives to deploying individual readers throughout the organization. NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) is a server-based, behind-the-firewall solution for centrally managing and administering feeds and subscriptions. As opposed to deploying readers on every user’s computer, NGES uses a clientless deployment model and allows users to view feeds in Outlook, on an intranet site or via a portal. The impact on IT departments is significantly less than it is with large deployments of individual-use readers. More detail is provided in the following sections. Bandwidth In the previous section, we discussed the impact on each user polling for feeds through the corporate gateway to the internet as well as internally on the company network. In many cases, more than one person within a company subscribes to the same feeds, particularly popular internal blogs and competitive news sites. With NewsGator Enterprise Server, you can avoid having multiple users ever retrieve same feed. NGES acts as a traffic cop and gets the feed one time, then distributes it internally to all subscribed users. In addition, NGES only distributes the feed Page 5 when requested through the web interface or only distributes the new articles in the feed when integrated with Microsoft Exchange. In a typical deployment, this reduces the bandwidth through the corporate gateway by more than 75%. Taking the same example as before, the savings are demonstrated below: • Organization with 3,000 RSS readers, each subscribes to 25 feeds • The average feed has 10 posts, each of which is 2KB in size • Only two posts a day are updated in the average feed • Only fifty percent of the feeds are unique (meaning that roughly half of the total subscribed feeds are subscribed to by only one person). • Administrators customize the settings for how often feeds are retrieved, but the default is usually every half hour Based on the above example, the maximum bandwidth consumption at any given moment would be (assuming that both new posts were updated at the same time) equal to: (3000 users) x (25 feeds)/2=37,500 feeds x 2 posts (2KB per post) = 150 MB. NGES also has the capability of ensuring that not all 37,500 posts are pulled simultaneously, instead it distributes the polling over a period of time, significantly reducing the bandwidth consumption at the edge of the network. Distribution from NGES to Outlook via exchange would require some bandwidth: (3000 users) x (25 feeds) x (2 posts x 2KB) = 300KB. In reality, not all users would be pulling feeds simultaneously, so the likely impact would be closer to 30 to 60KB. The graphic below depicts this model. Security NewsGator Enterprise Server allows you to deliver secure RSS feeds without overly burdening the users or the support staff. In addition to supporting authentication via user name or password, administrators can also allow users to use their Windows logon as authentication for a secure internal feed. In addition, since NewsGator is tightly integrated with Exchange and Active Directory, the product can utilize the single-sign capabilities provided through Active Directory. For Windows 2003 domains, NewsGator Enterprise Server supports protocol transitioning and constrained delegation to allow subscribing to and retrieving network-secured feeds without ever storing the user’s credentials in the NGES database. Enterprise Server Content Consumption Page 6 Hardware NewsGator Enterprise Server allows users to access their RSS feeds on the Web or via Outlook, without any client software to install. Instead of synchronizing feeds from the Web directly to Outlook (which requires a client installation), NewsGator Enterprise Server integrates directly through Exchange via the WebDAV protocol to deliver feeds right to a folder with Outlook. As a server-based product that lives behind the corporate firewall, there is software to install and hardware to maintain at the server level. NewsGator Enterprise Server is installed on a Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003 server. It is connected to a server running Microsoft SQL Server. To integrate with Active Directory for group and user management and single sign-on, a domain user with read access to the AD server must be provided during installation. To take advantage of the Exchange integration to deliver articles to Outlook without requiring client software, an Exchange account with send as and receive as permissions for the Exchange users is required. The diagram below provides a high-level model for the NewsGator Enterprise Server and how it fits within a corporate environment. IT Staffing Impact Although NewsGator requires an IT staff resource to install the product and manage connections between it and SQL Server, Exchange and Active Directory, there is no requirement to support or maintain desktop clients. In addition, management of the system from the perspective of subscribing users or groups to feeds or maintaining the taxonomy is not usually the responsibility of IT. In most cases, librarians, knowledge managers or even group (functional) administrators have the responsibility of handling those tasks. Page 7 CONCLUSION As more and more important, relevant content becomes available in RSS, both that manage content creation, licensing and distribution, and those that consume that content, will demand the ability to access via an RSS reader. While individual-use readers can fill this demand, they often cause as many problems as they solve from an IT standpoint. Products that allow for centralized management and administration of RSS feeds and subscriptions are quickly being adopted because they offer a clear advantage over individual readers, particularly from an IT perspective. To find out additional technical details about NewsGator Enterprise Server, please e-mail sales@newsgator.com.