I use Sterling Commerce’s EDI products daily at work. They recently added the option of providing patch notification via RSS. I signed up immediately and watched several patches come out without an update to the feed. Over the weekend, they finally updated the feed and notified me of a patch that just so happens could help one of my clients fix a problem. Sweet.
As long as they keep the feed up to date, they are on to something. They could use RSS in some other ways that would really benefit their customers.
1) Knowledge Base Update notifications.
The software has some known problems with no solutions provided in the Knowledge Base yet. If they provided a feed that would show us developers when new items were added to the Knowledge Base, it would keep us from searching for things that we have already tried to track down.
The Knowledge Base is currently only available to people that are paying for support, so maybe something like Bloglines feed privacy initiative would be needed first.
2) Documentation Updates
Their documentation often isn’t 100% accurate. Sometimes they update the documentation. I want to know when those updates occur and what was changed. Sounds like a job for RSS to me.
3) Document Tracking Status
Sterling Commerce has a Value Added Network (VAN) that companies use to send B2B documents back and forth. The VAN has many pluses and minuses that I won’t go into here. As part of the service, they provide document tracking. The website interface is horribly awkward. I would like to see them use RSS to tell customers the status of the documents. There aren’t too many privacy issues since all of the documents are wrapped in document envelopes that contain Sender ID, Receiver ID and a tracking number. Add a delivery status, pump it through a feed and consider me a happy camper.
4) Help Desk support updates
Help Desk tickets are managed through a web interface. The interface is perfectly acceptable, but I don’t want to have to log in to see if they have replied to my ticket. Let me monitor the tickets through an RSS feed. They don’t necessarily need to provide all of the data in the feed. There are some potential proprietary information issues that you might not want in the feed, but a simple “There is a new response to Ticket # 12345 would be very nice.
None of these suggestions are unique to Sterling Commerce. Any support website could use all of them to some extent and will probably become standard as the security improves and the demand increases.