Brad Feld

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RSS in the Enterprise – NewsGator partners with ePartners

May 10, 2006
Category Investments

NewsGator has been having good success with their NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a server-based product that lives behind a corporate firewall and integrates with Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and Active Directory to deliver RSS feeds directly to a Microsoft Outlook desktop via the Exchange server.  While installing desktop software is one approach to delivering RSS to the desktop in an enterprise, it’s not a particularly graceful one if you get up above say – 100 users.  NewsGator Enterprise server includes all the stuff you’d expect from a product that is integrated with Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, and Active Directory, but also includes a Web-based interface to the same data, and plenty of other functionality.

The other day, NewsGator announced a reseller partnership with ePartners, one of the largest Microsoft Business Solutions consultancies in the US.  Now – this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that follows my portfolio, as I’m an investor in both NewsGator and ePartners – but it’s exciting (at least to me) as it’s (a) the start of a new partner program that NewsGator has rolled out aimed at Microsoft Partners and (b) nice validation from ePartners, as the team there did deep analysis on the NewsGator Enterprise Server product and determined that they would offer NewsGator Enterprise Server as part of ePartners Web-based Portal, Customer Relationship Management, and Business Intelligence solution as well as use it internally. 

Also – today ePartners announced its Digital Dashboard Solutions, a business intelligence desktop tool that can incorporate NewsGator Enterprise Server.  It’s satisfying to see the implementation of the products in the enterprise coming together and being deployed and adopted.