Is logging in really worth it?

Our office SharePoint server is a good step in the right direction in terms of the visibility of ideas and the possibility for interactions between teammates. As mentioned in previous posts I’m doing my best to route technical questions that come across my desk through SharePoint. If you want me to fix something, I’ll write it up on a wiki or a forum thread so that you can participate in my thought process and workflow after the fact.

As great as this is in principle, reality keeps falling short of the ideal. Aside from the expected difficulty in getting teammates interested in setting aside their proven e-mail based workflow, I’m having trouble getting SharePoint to even work for *me*. Here’s the problem:

Our SharePoint site has a nest of subsections that can be hard to track individually

Our site has a different section for each team. Within the team subsections there can be unlimited numbers of wikis and forums, as well as the general file dump. Ideally I’d like to see each new thing that comes through the SharePoint site. The obvious way (to me at least) to track these updates would be through one or more RSS feeds. My reader of choice is Google Reader. You might be thinking “Wait, Google Reader is a consumer product and it will never work in the office!” You could be right. Just ask Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb – he’s convinced there’s a better way for professionals to use RSS on the job.

So we’ve got our SharePoint site set up with its jillion subsections, and lucky for me most of them can offer up an RSS feed for me to track.  I can’t put them in Google Reader though because this is ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE and thus I’ve got to authenticate with my network ID and password to even see the feeds. Strike one!  So now I have to try desktop-based RSS readers, something I haven’t done in two years.  So far I’ve tried two (RSSBandit and FeedDemon) and neither one of them can reliably read my SharePoint RSS feeds.  I’m keeping my eye out and occasionally trying new readers, but I really wonder if I’m not going about this the wrong way.

I’d really like to have a Google Reader-inspired web-based newsreader running inside our firewall.  Maybe an enterprise version of gReader will be out there for us to buy one day!  I hear NewsGator has something like that, but I am not really sure I’ll get a chance to push that through our IT/security groups.  I’ll keep you posted though!

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