Enterprise RSS: RSS Feeds for Your SalesForce.com CRM Data

RSS Enterprise services are slowly but surely coming to market in order to help companies improve many facets of their internal content management.

But until recently, there weren't many RSS developments in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) space, a key marketing function.

Since yesterday, companies using SalesForce.com, one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market, can now integrate their SalesForce.com account with Spanning Salesforce 2.0, a free tool that allows them to subscribe to information from their Salesforce.com account via RSS.

What's the point?

Using Spanning Salesforce 2.0 CRM managers, account managers and sales representatives can receive the latest information updates from their SalesForce.com accounts without being bombarded by e-mail notifications of that same content.

While this may seem simple enough, it is in fact an important breakthrough in terms of information management and ease of consuming information. E-mail just isn't suitable for frequent content updates, as these will interfere with your other business communications. RSS finally removes this obstacle.

Spanning Partners certainly are a company to watch, as they're headed by Charlie Wood, previously Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at NewsGator, the Enterprise RSS leader.

Here's Charlie's take on RSS for Enterprise use:

"Companies are looking for ways to surface and deliver information that currently lives in their enterprise applications but is hard to access and track--what Paul Kedrosky calls the dark matter in the information universe. They want to monitor sales leads, customer support incidents, supply chain metrics, and project status. They also want to be able to deliver product updates, technical support information, and promotions to their customers. They see RSS as an enabling technology for these applications. Nearly every one of the enterprise customers I've talked to wants to do these things but doesn't know where to start."