However, the trick to pull this off is to make sure that you're dealing with secure and authenticated RSS to ensure the information does not get into the hands of the wrong or inappropriate individuals.

David: Does the RSS spec fully support authentication in RSS?

Scott: When you're trying to personalize the RSS feed in terms of dynamic information delivery to people, you want to make sure you're delivering the right and most relevant information to the right person. In terms of maintaining compliance and security, this is very important, as you don't want to accidentally serve up a piece of information to someone who is not entitled to see it. You can imagine the issues this could cause an organization for both internal and external stakeholders.

Marek: So, authenticated RSS not only secures corporate information, but allows for targeted delivery. It's about RSS delivered in a security context not just securely.

The RSS 2.0 specification does not cleanly support authentication, which is to say that it does not have any channel elements nor optional channel elements to do with authentication. Which isn't to say you can't leverage authentication with RSS, because you can, it's just not part of the specification.

In putting DocLogic together though, we found that we wanted to take advantage of other content element information that was not in the RSS 2.0 specification. The RSS 2.0 specification also allows for namespaces. The namespace addition is for handling custom elements. So, just like Microsoft's proposed Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) specification to RSS 2.0, we did that too. It was great when Microsoft announced SSE as it validated our approach to the technology. Currently our approach is similar from a "usage model" point of view.

David: So you're using RSS for workflow? That's interesting. How's that fit into the solution?

Scott: We serve up several content items in the context of RSS for a number of reasons. RSS allows us to provide an alternative or break away from having to leverage email as the alert mechanism. RSS allows us to do many things -- it allows for the flexible consumption of information in different locations, including outside the application.

This allows people to gain access to the information without "living in" DocLogic, allowing them to get to the information on their terms, not necessary DocLogic's terms. By not attempting to change people's work styles, they're more likely to adopt the solution, thus increasing the likelihood it will be deemed a successful project.

As steps inside a workflow are completed, information can be served up to individuals. Email is a great communication tool -- but is quite limiting from an information publishing point of view. Only email can be consumed by an email client, but RSS can be consumed by multiple technologies. Also, with the onslaught of email, notifications can be easily buried (where someone just doesn't see it) to being caught in a spam filter (where they will never see it).