In honor of "Enterprise RSS Day", we thought we'd offer something to help kickstart some Enterprise RSS action for PeopleSoft customers.

One of the reasons why Enterprise level RSS is not more popular is that most RSS news readers don't understand the security rules of enterprise applications. Some RSS readers understand HTTP level authentication, but I'm not aware of any enterprise level applications that actually use HTTP level authentication. Everything that I've ever seen is forms-based (I'm excluding fancy options like smartcards, biometrics, etc.; just what comes out of the box).

If the news readers can't get into the enterprise system, then the enterprise system owners never feels any pressure to produce the RSS feeds. Classic chicken and egg problem.

So, what is Grey Sparling doing to help?

As you're probably aware, Grey Sparling has a Desktop Single Signon product for PeopleSoft that uses your Windows login credentials to establish your PeopleSoft session for you. We also have a new PeopleSoft specific Web Application Firewall, which we call ERP Firewall for PeopleSoft.

Combining the two of them allows us to offer the ability for desktop based RSS news readers to establish a PeopleSoft session for the user, but only for RSS feeds! The session can't be used for any other purpose but reading RSS. The user can still login to PeopleSoft themselves and do their regular work, but the automatic login for the news reader is blocked from doing anything else.

The PeopleSoft session that the RSS news reader uses is logged in as the actual PeopleSoft user, so all regular PeopleSoft data security is applied to the feeds. Take a look at some of the proof of concept RSS generation from PeopleSoft that Brent Martin put together to get some more ideas about how you could do this in your organization.

Great, how about a freebie?

To get things going here, we're going to offer a free copy of this to some one out there. If you win, you'll get full support and assistance just like any paying customer, which means a production instance of a PeopleSoft, along with as many dev and test instances that you use to support that production instance. No user limits, no CPU limits, etc. etc.

There is a catch though.

We're going to do a lottery to pick a winner, but in order to get your virtual hat thrown in the ring, you have to come up a few good scenarios where you'd put this to use within your organization. Ideally this would be something that you'd be willing to share as a case study (maybe a user conference presentation or something).

You can either email us "enterpriserss at greysparling.com" with your ideas, or better yet, post a comment here or on your blog.

Anything else to be aware of?

• In order to use this you need to be able to install software in your PeopleSoft environment.
  
• The RSS news reader that gets used should be something that runs on each user's desktop. This is because it's the Desktop Single Signon product that is providing the news reader access into PeopleSoft. If you use a server based news reader, then it won't be able to use your existing Windows login. There are some ways that this could be enabled in the future, but nothing that we're ready to provide today.
  
• Since this uses your Windows login, it's only meant for people that login to your Windows network (so this doesn't yet help with providing your external customers access to PeopleSoft RSS feeds).
  
• What we're offering is around the security of RSS access, not actual RSS feed content. Take a look at Brent Martin's blog entry for ideas on actually creating RSS feeds inside PeopleSoft.
  

Labels: 2008, EnterpriseRSS