Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:00 AM
I totally missed
this posting from a few months back. Greg Reinacker, the guy behind the Outlook-based feed reader
NewsGator, laid out the NewsGator product development roadmap. NewsGator just landed its third round of venture capital financing, and has raised $10 million in the last 11 months, so my guess is it will have the funding to move forward on this roadmap. Of course, I still believe NewsGator may face the reality of being bought up by a larger corporation like Microsoft before it can deploy its roadmap, but that's not really pertinent here.
What is pertinent is that NewsGator's product road map includes a server-based version of NewsGator, that will allow law firm technical staff to deploy NewsGator without having to touch every user's computer. In addition, according to what I have read, the server-based version will work similarly to the client-install version I have been using the last couple of years; with the feeds simply showing up as another set of folders in your Outlook folder bar.
I am currently of the opinion that an RSS reader operating within Outlook will be the dominant player among lawyers. Here's why:
- The major document management systems (i.e., from Hummingbird, Interwoven) have already committed to delivering their functionality via Outlook folders. In addition, a number of the other key applications, including unified messaging products, that one tends to see deployed at many law firms across the country, are moving in the same direction. The end result being that Outlook is already becoming the go-to resource for lawyers.
- The average (especially senior) lawyer has two applications open every day: a word processor and an email application. Web browsers are a distant (but closing the gap) third.
- Lawyers know how to use email clients like Outlook and know how to open folders in the Outlook folder bar. No additional training is necessary (except perhaps a 5 minute overview about how to subscribe to feeds).
There are likely others reasons, of course, but those above are powerful enough, when coupled with the relative ease of deployment that server-based solutions can offer across the enterprise, to put my bet behind NewsGator (or a product like it).
From a cheerleader standpoint, what is exciting about server-based NewsGator is that law firms and corporate legal staff may have the option of deploying--to their entire user base--an Outlook-based reader at a reasonable cost much sooner than whenever it is that Microsoft gets around to delivering this feature innately as part of Office. And, while the economics of buying and dedicating scarce technical resources to installing and maintaining many copies of a newsreader can be a tough sell, a reasonably-priced, low administration product has a lot stronger legs on which to stand. In the end, the kind of developments outlined by Greg Reinacker's NewsGator roadmap are exactly those needed to move the blawgosphere forward to the masses. Let's hope he and the rest of team at NewsGator succeed.