More than any other Web 2.0 technology, RSS is having a profound impact on enterprise applications in general and CRM in particular. In August 2005 Spanning Partners launched Spanning Salesforce, a hosted service that allows Salesforce.com customers to subscribe to their CRM data—leads, opportunities, documents, etc.—via secure RSS feeds.
Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, called the service, "something that any salesperson or customer service rep will love and any Salesforce user ... would be stupid to be without."
A few months after Spanning Salesforce launched, I got an email from Brian Benz, who is the CFO and COO of Campus TeleVideo, the nation’s largest private cable operator dedicated exclusively to the college and university market. If you're in school and get cable TV in your dorm room, chances are you're a customer of Campus TeleVideo.
Brian was looking for a solution to a problem he had with Salesforce.com. Several people inside his company needed to process various documents—purchase orders, contracts, etc.—stored in Salesforce.com as attachments. Brian had an administrative assistant spending 20 hours per week uploading documents and sending email notifications to the interested parties. He contracted Spanning Partners to create a new RSS feed for Spanning Salesforce that would allow him to subscribe to new and updated attachments and receive those documents as RSS enclosures.
By automating what had been a manual process, the new feed service paid for itself in its first month of operation.
RSS turns the traditional model for accessing data stored in enterprise applications on its head. In the past, users have been forced to log into enterprise applications to get at their data. Now RSS delivers data from those applications to users.
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