Spanning Partners

NewsGator Integrates Spanning Salesforce to add RSS Functionality to Salesforce.com

Partnership delivers time critical CRM information to employees through RSS feeds via NewsGator Enterprise RSS Solutions and Spanning Salesforce

Denver, Col., Jan. 29, 2007 — NewsGator Technologies, the leading RSS company, and Spanning Partners today announced a partnership to deliver updates from the Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) system through NewsGator's Enterprise RSS Solutions. By combining Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator's award-winning solutions, sales, marketing and service teams will have instant access to CRM information when they are in the office or out in the field via the Web, mobile devices, Microsoft Outlook® and desktop readers.

Users can quickly and easily choose from dozens of feeds – or create their own – to track leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents and support cases to provide the highest level of customer service. NewsGator customers using Spanning Salesforce will always have the latest information available without needing to login to Salesforce.com.

The capabilities are available through the NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (NGEOD) services. NGEOD delivers this capability in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, eliminating the IT burden of deploying, hosting and maintaining an on-site RSS server. NewsGator Enterprise Server won an InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award last month (http://www.newsgator.com/enterprise-infoworld.aspx).

Users signing up for a free 30-day trial of NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand will also receive a 30-day trial subscription to Spanning Salesforce. For more information, visit: http://www.newsgator.com/on-demand.aspx.

"RSS is clearly the most powerful method for delivering CRM data where it needs to be, in real-time," said Charlie Wood, founding principal of Spanning Partners. "The success of a business can often rest on the knowledge and information sales and marketing teams have about their customers. Giving them a way to have easily accessible, continuously updated information that they can look at anywhere is invaluable. Together, Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator bring that capability to our customers through the power of RSS."

"With sales, marketing and service professional constantly facing information overload via e-mail, having updates from enterprise applications delivered via RSS can significantly improve their productivity and effectiveness," said Dave Keller, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions for NewsGator Technologies. "The combination of Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand provides the opportunity for sales, marketing or service teams to have access to important information, when they want and where they want it, without having to worry about the IT requirements.

Spanning Salesforce Pricing
Spanning Salesforce is available for $129.95 per user, per year or $12.95 monthly.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies is the world's leading RSS company. Headquartered in Denver, CO, NewsGator develops and markets RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Using NewsGator products and solutions, businesses and consumers can subscribe to news, information, podcasts and other relevant content more efficiently and effectively than with traditional channels. With NewsGator, users have access to RSS information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook, mobile devices and both Windows- and Mac-based desktop clients. All NewsGator products synchronize seamlessly, enabling users to read their RSS feeds anywhere, anytime, with any device. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

About Spanning Partners
Spanning Partners connects you to your most valuable information. Based in Austin, Texas, Spanning Partners was founded in 2005 by former NewsGator Vice President Charlie Wood. For more information please visit spanningpartners.com.

Contact Information
Gavin Skillman or Corey Lewis
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad.com

eWEEK on Enterprise RSS

eWEEK is running a cover story on RSS titled RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload. From the article:

The momentum behind RSS growth appears strong. [Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young] said that RSS enablement is becoming popular for mainstream applications. For example, Spanning Partners' Spanning Salesforce 3.0 is a tool that lets Salesforce.com send out information about new leads and contacts to salespeople via an RSS reader.

Spanning Sync Nearing Launch

Our customers know us best for Spanning Salesforce, the service that adds RSS feeds to Salesforce.com. But for the past few months, we've been hard at work on our next line of services, Spanning Sync, the first of which provides bidirectional calendar synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal.

Spanning Sync has been in private beta since early October and is scheduled to launch later this month. We've been documenting our progress and getting great feedback on the Spanning Sync Blog. We invite you to come check it out.

Of course we continue to work closely with Salesforce.com, and are planning a Spanning Sync service to synchronize events from Salesforce with Google Calendar as well. I spoke about this project at Dreamforce in October.

2007 is shaping up to be a great—and busy—year!

Spanning Salesforce on StartupSquad

I recently spoke with Vivek Puri, who writes the StartupSquad blog, about Spanning Salesforce. He's written up our conversation in a brief article titled Spanning Partners: small team, great solution.

Coordinating Marketing Events Using Spanning Salesforce

By combining Salesforce.com, Spanning Salesforce, the Spanning Feed Builder, and NewsGator Enterprise Server, one MarCom manager's job just got a lot easier, and the executives she supports just got a lot better informed.

This afternoon I got an email from a Marketing Communications manager asking me if it was possible to automatically send out updates about her company's marketing events, which she manages in Salesforce.com, to her company's executives on their BlackBerrys.

As it turns out, her company uses NewsGator Enterprise Server, so the pieces were all in place. I called her on the phone and walked her through the process of installing Spanning Feed Builder into her Salesforce.com instance and creating a custom Events feed. She subscribed to it and said in a delighted (and more than just a little surprised) voice, "Hey, it works!"

I explained to her that should could email the link to the feed to anyone in her company so they could subscribe to it. But she reminded me that since they use NewsGator Enterprise Server, she could just add the feed to the proper exec's subscription lists and they'd start getting updated Events information--on their BlackBerrys--without lifting a finger.

So after 30 minutes on the phone, I've got seven new subscribers to Spanning Salesforce, she's got an automatic way to connect her company to its most valuable information, and Salesforce.com has one very happy customer. I love it when things just work.

Update: NewsGator investor Brad Feld thinks this is all very neat. Me too, Brad!

Skinkers Releases Salesforce Alerts

UK-based Skinkers today released Skinkers Salesforce Alerts, a flash-based desktop alerts system that's tightly integrated with Spanning Salesforce.

The Skinkers application provides desktop alerts and tickers that use slick animation effects to deliver timely information from Salesforce.com via Spanning Salesforce feeds. Users can also easily add other web feeds through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Skinkers Salesforce Alerts are by far the easiest way to get started with Spanning Salesforce, especially for users who don't want to have to learn about the technical plumbing that makes it all work.

I encourage you to watch the screencast, browse the AppExchange listing, and download the free trial.

To access the Salesforce.com feeds, you'll also need a Spanning Salesforce account. If you're not already a Spanning Salesforce user, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial at spanningsalesforce.com.

Speaking on GData at Dreamforce

I've been invited to speak alongside Ron Hess at salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in San Francisco next month about my experiences integrating Salesforce and other AppExchange applications with Google using the GData API. Here are the details:

Session Title: Business Mashups: Best of the Web APIs
Track: New AppExchange Developer
Date and Time: 10/11/2006 9:00 AM
Session Description: AppExchange has always been a powerful platform for creating mashups, and the new platform features make it more capable than ever mixing Internet services. This session will provide an introduction to some of the more popular Web APIs, including API's from Google and Yahoo, and show how they can be leveraged inside of your AppExchange apps. Presentations will include sample code showing demonstrating these services, as well as example mashups.

The combination of the AppExchange API and GData provides an incredibly powerful platform for creating applications that harness the best of what salesforce.com calls The Business Web. I hope to see you at the show.

Speaking at the Office 2.0 Conference

I've been invited to speak at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco October 11-12. I'll be speaking about something in which I've been immersed for the past few months: data synchronization among applications, both desktop and hosted.

Synchronization is listed as an Office 2.0 bug and rightly so, but I'll argue that it could turn out to be one of the new paradigm's greatest strengths. My session will also include the public debut of a sync system that's been keeping me busy, plus maybe a surprise or two.

I'm flattered to be included among the speakers, among which are such familiar names as Rod Boothby , Jeff Nolan , Jeff Clavier , Ross Mayfield , and Scott Dietzen , as well as a host of people I'm eager to meet. The fact that the conference is scheduled to immediately follow salesforce.com's Dreamforce event, which I'll be attending in some capacity, made the decision to commit even easier.

Space for the Office 2.0 Conference is limited and discounted early registration ends September 1, so if you're interested I recommend you sign up now. I hope to see you there.

Spanning Partners in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

From Tech companies hope to cash in on Web 2.0:

The software-as-a-service model isn't exactly new. In the late 1990s, companies with the concept were called "application service providers." The market leader remains San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, with more than 400,000 customers using its customer relationship management software.

As broadband access has increased and computer processors have grown faster, more people are finding software delivered over the Web a viable alternative to traditional software.

Charlie Wood has been in the technology industry for nearly 15 years. Last year, he noticed the increasing number of companies using the software as a service model and launched Spanning Partners, which creates applications that work with those sites.

Wood said a major reason for the increase in such online services is that renting servers and other costs related to hosting a Web site have dropped dramatically.

"A one-man startup like mine can deliver software more effectively and cheaply through a Web site than shipping out CDs," Wood said.

It's good to be occasionally reminded that many people find Software as a Service to be a novel idea, and have never even heard of "web feeds" or "microformats".

Use Apple iCal to Track Your Salesforce.com Tasks and Events

After a two-month beta period, Spanning Salesforce for iCal was officially launched today. Spanning Salesforce users can now subscribe to their tasks and events from salesforce.com and view them in Apple iCal and other iCalendar-enabled applications. And using iSync and iTunes, users can synchronize those tasks and events with their mobile phones and iPods.

Here's how to get started in 3 easy steps:

Sign up for a Free 30-Day Trial of Spanning Salesforce
Remember, a salesforce.com Enterprise or Unlimited Edition license is required.

Click here to subscribe to your salesforce.com Events
When prompted, use your salesforce.com username and password.

Click here to subscribe to your salesforce.com Tasks
When prompted, use your salesforce.com username and password.

If you have any questions or run into any problems, email customer.service@spanningpartners.com.

Spanning Salesforce in CFO Magazine

Using Spanning Salesforce to track updated information in Salesforce.com, Campus Televideo makes sure their six-figure invoices get delivered on time.

CFO Magazine highlights the story of early Spanning Salesforce customer Brian Benz at Campus Televideo in a recent article, Home Delivery:

In the pantheon of unwelcome messages delivered to finance chiefs, "We forgot to bill the client" is number five (right between "J.J. smeared pudding all over your Treo" and "Legal says you got a notice from some guy named Wells"). When Campus Televideo president and CFO Brian Benz found out that the company's accounting department had failed to invoice a large university for a cable TV project, he cringed. Apparently, an internal-communications gap had left the accounts-receivable manager clueless about the six-figure contract. Says Benz: "It's difficult to go to a customer and say, 'We forgot to bill you for a couple of months. You owe us for three months of service.'"

Keen to avoid a replay of the billing snafu, Benz turned to a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Fitted to Campus Televideo's Salesforce.com software (by Spanning Partners LLC), [Spanning Salesforce] automatically sends E-mail notifications to pertinent Campus Televideo employees whenever a new or updated contract or purchase order is uploaded. "By making sure the process is 100 percent automated," notes Benz, "I never have to think about whether the right people are informed."

Introducing Spanning Feed Builder for AppExchange

Spanning Feed Builder lets administrators, developers, and power users build custom feeds for AppExchange applications (including Salesforce) that store their data in the AppExchange platform.

For more information, visit spanningsalesforce.com/feedbuilder.

(Click for a larger image.)

Service Restored

Today at 16:37 GMT, the facility that hosts the Spanning Salesforce servers experienced a power issue (either a loss or a surge--they're not sure which) that took down several routers, leaving Spanning Salesforce unreachable. Service was restored at 21:14 GMT.

Spanning Salesforce Outage

A network switch has failed at our hosting facility, taking Spanning Salesforce—and the new feed builder—offline. I'll post a notice when it's back up.

Spanning Partners to RSS-Enable AppExchange Applications

Over the past few months I've spoken to a number of vendors providing applications on salesforce.com's AppExchange. In every conversation, I eventually get the same question: "I'd like to add RSS support to my app--how much do you think it will cost?" My answer has always been, "It depends, but building Spanning Salesforce from scratch would cost about $50,000." But last week that all changed.

AppExchange partners can now add RSS feeds to their applications for free.

Salesforce.com's Partner Success Blog carries the announcement:

AppExchange partners can now add RSS feeds to their applications at no cost. Spanning Salesforce delivers RSS feeds of data stored in the AppExchange, including standard objects, custom objects, and custom fields—anything accessible by the API. Spanning Partners will create and host simple custom feeds—for free*—for AppExchange partners wanting to make their applications' data available to their users via RSS. By adding RSS feeds to their AppExchange applications, partners give their users access to data that is constantly-updated and always-accessible online and offline.
(To subscribe to partners' feeds, end users will need to sign up for Spanning Salesforce, which costs $12.95/month or $129.95/year after a 30-day free trial. They'll also need an RSS reader that supports secure feeds, several of which are featured on the Spanning Salesforce site at http://spanningsalesforce.com.)

Interested partners should contact Charlie Wood directly by phone at 512-217-6551 or email at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com.

* Feeds requiring complex logic may require some paid consulting work.

By adding RSS to their applications, AppExchange partners give their users the ability to track new and updated information as it becomes available. Spanning Salesforce leverages the power of the AppExchange on-demand platform to make it easy.

Spanning Partners Delivers RSS for CRM on Salesforce.com's AppExchange

Spanning Salesforce lets users subscribe to Salesforce with RSS

SAN FRANCISCO — salesforce.com Appforce Conference -- May 24, 2006 — Spanning Partners, a leading enterprise RSS services company, and salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the availability of Spanning Salesforce for salesforce.com's AppExchange. Salesforce.com customers can now subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds to stay on top of their most important CRM information without logging into the salesforce.com web site. Built on the AppExchange on-demand platform, Spanning Salesforce for AppExchange is immediately available at http://www.spanningsalesforce.com/appexchange. The announcement was made today at Appforce, salesforce.com's first annual AppExchange partner, user and developer conference.

Spanning Salesforce allows users to track new and updated information in Salesforce using Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the technology popularized by blogs and podcasting. Using RSS readers like those available from Attensa and NewsGator, salesforce.com customers can quickly and easily choose from among dozens of Spanning Salesforce feeds to track leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents, and support cases. Spanning Salesforce users can always have the latest information at their fingertips without needing to log in to Salesforce.

"Spanning Salesforce for AppExchange keeps salesforce.com customers up to date with their critical business data," said Charlie Wood, founding principal of Spanning Partners. "As a former sales rep and a long-time Salesforce user, I know how important it is to have at-a-glance access to my most important CRM information, whether I'm at my desk, in a meeting, or on a plane. Building on the AppExchange platform, Spanning Salesforce brings that capability to salesforce.com customers using RSS."

"Spanning Partners' delivery of secure RSS feeds as a service on the AppExchange creates a great mashup of RSS and on-demand CRM," said Adam Gross, vice president, developer marketing, salesforce.com. "Given the explosive adoption of RSS, we are thrilled to have Spanning Salesforce among the vanguard of AppExchange applications."

Spanning Salesforce for AppExchange is one of more than 250 applications created by salesforce.com, its customers and partners that are now available on the salesforce.com AppExchange, the world's first on-demand application platform. AppExchange provides unprecedented ease of customization and integration for Salesforce deployments, as well as enabling a whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond CRM. AppExchange enables all of these on-demand applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with one click into a customer's salesforce.com account. AppExchange can be found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

About Spanning Partners
Spanning Partners is RSS-enabling the enterprise, one application at a time. The company, based in Austin, Texas, counts among its clients enterprise applications vendors, Web 2.0 startups, and their customers. Spanning Partners was founded in 2005 by former NewsGator Vice President Charlie Wood. For more information please visit http://spanningpartners.com.

About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand applications enables customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. AppExchange, salesforce.com's on-demand platform, allows customers and partners to build powerful new applications quickly and easily, customize and integrate the Salesforce suite to meet their unique business needs, and distribute and sell on-demand apps at www.appexchange.com. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of April 30, 2006, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 22,700 customers and approximately 444,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Media Contact
Charlie Wood
Spanning Partners
512-217-6551
charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com

Gordon Evans
Salesforce.com
415-536-7608
gevans@salesforce.com

Subscribe Your Calendar to Your Salesforce.com Events

As you know, Spanning Salesforce has feeds that contain your calendar events from salesforce.com. But until Ray Ozzie's vision of RSS+SSE+hCalendar gains widespread adoption—which, given the fact that Microsoft is only now adding .ics support to Outlook 2007, doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon—you're going to need something a little less "Web 2.0ey", which is where the newest Spanning Salesforce "feed" comes in:

My Salesforce.com Events (beta)

Note that this isn't an RSS feed—it's an old-school published .ics calendar, albeit a dynamically-generated, personalized, encrypted, salesforce.com-integrated one. You must be a Spanning Salesforce user to access it, but signing up for a free 30-day trial takes less than a minute. When prompted by your calendaring app to log in, just enter your salesforce.com username and password.

The service is currently in beta, since it's only been tested with Apple iCal, but results with that application have been great. If you use another iCalendar-capable calendar app, I'd appreciate it if you tried it out and gave me some feedback.

I'll be posting more on this in the coming days, since there's some pretty cool RSS+SLE stuff going on under the covers. Thanks to Ismael Ghalimi for the impetus.

Spanning Salesforce Live on the AppExchange

Spanning Salesforce is now live on salesforce.com's AppExchange.

View the listing to see a short presentation introducing the service, download the data sheet , and read the customization guide, which gives detailed instructions on how to set up your RSS reader to work with Spanning Salesforce.

To keep track of new developments, be sure to visit and subscribe to the Spanning Salesforce Blog .

Spanning Partners: Bridging the Divide between the Enterprise and Web 2.0

In 2004 I started tracking the emergence of RSS in the enterprise on my blog, Moonwatcher. In 2005 I started Spanning Partners to bridge the divide (hence the name) between enterprise applications and what's come to be known as "Web 2.0", with a particular focus on RSS and related technologies. That means that I serve three constituencies: Enterprise applications vendors, Web 2.0 applications vendors, and customers of both of them.

Much of my work is consulting, helping vendors from each world figure out how to engage with and benefit from the other. But my most visible work is aimed at end users. For example, Spanning Salesforce lets salesforce.com customers subscribe to their CRM data using RSS. I'll be introducing some additional services later this year.

So whether your company is an enterprise apps vendor looking to leverage Web 2.0 technologies, a Web 2.0 startup trying to penetrate the enterprise, or a customer interested in combining the two yourself, please drop me an email at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com and we'll set up a call.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Gilbane Conference in San Francisco Next Week

Next week I'll be back in San Francisco attending the Gilbane Conference on Content Management. Wednesday morning I'll be participating in a panel on RSS in the Enterprise along with NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker , which promises to be fun.

I'll actually be in town Sunday evening through Wednesday afternoon, so if you're in the city and want to get together, drop me an email. I plan on visiting some of my favorite restaurants while I'm there, including Brandy Ho's and Blowfish.

Spanning Salesforce Traffic

I decided to perform some simple traffic analysis against the Spanning Salesforce logs and was delighted to see the trend. Traffic for April is estimated on a pure pro rata basis, and doesn't take into account accelerating adoption.

Perspectives on Salesforce Gives Spanning Salesforce Five Stars

Scott Hemmeter of Perspectives on Salesforce has written a thorough review of Spanning Salesforce, giving it five stars—his highest rating.

Scott runs Arrowpointe, a prominent Salesforce consulting provider, and is the creator of the wildly popular User Adoption Dashboard. His name and his work were mentioned several times at the recent AppExchange seminar in Austin, and his suggestions for things like platform edition licensing are clearly having an impact on the folks from One Market Street.

Scott Hemmeter is a well-respected voice in the Salesforce community, and I'm thrilled to have earned his highest rating. Thanks, Scott!

Latest Spanning Salesforce Release Adds Features, Feeds, and Subscription Plans

This morning Spanning Partners launched the latest major release of Spanning Salesforce, our service that lets users subscribe to Salesforce.com with RSS. There's so much to talk about I'm going to skip the marketing hoo-ha and get right to what's new.

New Subscription Model

All Spanning Salesforce subscrptions now start with a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $12.95/month or $129.95/year, adding less than 10% to the cost of a Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition license, and just over 5% to that of an Unlimited Edition license. An Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition license is required to use Spanning Salesforce.

Signup is all done online and takes less than a minute. Payments are handled through PayPal to ensure the utmost security. Companies signing up 10 or more users qualify for a substantial discount and can request to be invoiced.

New Feeds

The number of feeds that comprise Spanning Salesforce has almost tripled, and continues to grow daily. In addition to Leads, Opportunities, and Cases, users can now track Contacts, Tasks, Events, Documents, and Attachments using any RSS reader that supports secure feeds.

See the newly redesigned web site for a complete list of feeds, or subscribe to the OPML file.

New Features

A ton of work has been done under the hood for this release.

To make the system more scalable, substantial optimizations have been made to the system's use of the Salesforce.com Web Services API. The system's core engine has been completely refactored, so new feeds can be quickly added in response to customer demand.

The feeds themselves have been enhanced as well. Spanning Salesforce now supports custom fields so any extensions your organization has added to the basic Salesforce.com object model will be reflected in your feeds. Also, reference fields now contain meaningful names linked directly to the referenced object, so relationships between accounts, contacts, and opportunities are immediately clear.

Finally, the new release adds support for Microsoft's Simple List Extensions (SLE), which provide flexible data sorting and filtering options to SLE-enabled RSS readers.

Feedback

We're constantly looking for ways to make Spanning Salesforce better, so if you have a suggestion please let us know at feedback@spanningpartners.com.

On Creating Real Business Value with RSS

More than any other Web 2.0 technology, RSS is having a profound impact on enterprise applications in general and CRM in particular. In August 2005 Spanning Partners launched Spanning Salesforce, a hosted service that allows Salesforce.com customers to subscribe to their CRM data—leads, opportunities, documents, etc.—via secure RSS feeds.

Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, called the service, "something that any salesperson or customer service rep will love and any Salesforce user ... would be stupid to be without."

A few months after Spanning Salesforce launched, I got an email from Brian Benz, who is the CFO and COO of Campus TeleVideo, the nation’s largest private cable operator dedicated exclusively to the college and university market. If you're in school and get cable TV in your dorm room, chances are you're a customer of Campus TeleVideo.

Brian was looking for a solution to a problem he had with Salesforce.com. Several people inside his company needed to process various documents—purchase orders, contracts, etc.—stored in Salesforce.com as attachments. Brian had an administrative assistant spending 20 hours per week uploading documents and sending email notifications to the interested parties. He contracted Spanning Partners to create a new RSS feed for Spanning Salesforce that would allow him to subscribe to new and updated attachments and receive those documents as RSS enclosures.

By automating what had been a manual process, the new feed service paid for itself in its first month of operation.

RSS turns the traditional model for accessing data stored in enterprise applications on its head. In the past, users have been forced to log into enterprise applications to get at their data. Now RSS delivers data from those applications to users.

Virtual Reach Integrates Spanning Salesforce Within Newsclip

Toronto, ON, Austin, Texas - 3 February 2006 - Virtual Reach Inc. (“Virtual Reach”) and Spanning Partners announced today the integration of the Spanning Salesforce service with Virtual Reach’s Newsclip software application for mobile devices.

Spanning Salesforce is a secure RSS service that allows Salesforce.com users to track new and updated leads, opportunities, documents, and other information. Now integrated with the service, Newsclip provides users real-time mobile access to that data.

The addition of Spanning Salesforce is the first of many value add features planned for Newsclip. “Partnering with Spanning Partners,” commented Brian Goldberg, President of Virtual Reach, “gives us a differentiating feature that not only adds considerable value to our application, but also broadens the appeal of Newsclip in the marketplace. Sales professionals are typically mobile,” he added, “and the addition of the Spanning Salesforce feeds makes our mobile application a great fit for a mobile professional.”

Coinciding with the release of the Spanning Salesforce integration is support in Newsclip for Basic and Digest authentication login and password protected feeds. The addition of these features opens the door for other enterprise level applications requiring security and privacy to be deployed using the Newsclip service.

“Spanning Salesforce enables sales professionals to stay on top of the constantly changing information critical to their success,” said Charlie Wood, Principal, Spanning Partners. “Newsclip now provides sales professionals with mobile access to the same information,” he added.

Within the Spanning Salesforce feature, Newsclip will accommodate up to ten different field configurations for each individual Salesforce.com account. Newsclip integration with the Spanning Salesforce service will give users access to the following RSS feeds pulling data securely from their Salesforce.com accounts:

New Documents
My Unread Leads
My Open Opportunities
My Opportunities Closing This Quarter
My Open Cases
My Open Escalations

The feature is already incorporated into the latest version of Newsclip. Existing subscribers can install the new version from the Virtual Reach website, www.virtualreach.com.

About Virtual Reach Inc.

Virtual Reach is a leading developer of compelling and useful software applications for wireless devices, specializing in the efficient delivery of content and media to mobile handsets. The Virtual Reach suite of products are built on a platform using RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication”, a fast growing and open Internet standard used for syndicating various forms of content throughout the world. With its flagship product, Newsclip™, users are provided with the ability to access, manage and consume content of all kinds directly on their mobile handset with ease and efficiency.

Founded in 2004, Virtual Reach is a privately owned company with its corporate head office in Mississauga, Ontario. For more information on Virtual Reach and its RSS solutions for wireless and mobile platforms, please visit www.virtualreach.com.

About Spanning Partners

Spanning Partners is a privately-held consulting firm specializing in RSS-enabling enterprise applications. The company also operates a variety of enterprise RSS services including Spanning Salesforce, which delivers information from Salesforce.com via secure, personalized feeds. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Spanning Partners was founded in 2005 by Charlie Wood, who previously served as VP of Enterprise Solutions for RSS software vendor NewsGator Technologies.

Visit Spanning Partners online at spanningpartners.com.

Virtual Reach, the Virtual Reach logo, and Newsclip are all trademarks of Virtual Reach Inc.

- 30 -

For More Information, Contact:

Robert Belliveau
Director, Business Development
Virtual Reach
800 204 1831 x. 84

Charlie Wood
Principal
Spanning Partners
charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com
512 217 6551

Webinar: Incorporating RSS into Enterprise Content Management

You can now view this seminar online here.

Your company probably has a significant investment in Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Learn how RSS fits in, and what tangible benefits it can provide.

As I've written and spoken about before, RSS is a natural complement to Enterprise Content Management. ECM vendor Stellent has invited me to participate in their ECM Expert Series to talk about how businesses can leverage their investments in content management to realize the benefits of the subscribe model enabled by RSS.

Tuesday, January 24 at 2:00p EST/11:00a PST I'll be presenting an online seminar titled Incorporate RSS Into Your ECM Investment. I'll be giving a high-level overview of recent developments and real-world examples of how companies can benefit from extending their current ECM implementations.

The presentation will be non-technical, and is intended for business owners interested in the enterprise applications of the technology. But I'll also be taking questions, so the technologists in the audience should come prepared to either learn something or stump me. :-)

You can register for this free event online. I look forward to seeing you there.

Gilbane Wrap-Up

I've finally gotten a chance to sit down and organize my notes from the Gilbane Conference. Much of what I learned will be incorporated into a joint webinar I'll be presenting in January with enterprise content management vendor Stellent, but here are some of my most vivid impressions from the show:

RSS has much less mindshare in the Content Management market than it should. This is a potentially disruptive technology, and ECM vendors need to figure out how to integrate it into their offerings.
Web 2.0 vendors don't think enough about integrating their products into existing IT infrastructures and corporate cultures. Walking in the door and saying, "Step one: forget everything you know about how your company works," is not a strategy for success.
There is a wide gap between Web 2.0 product vendors and Enterprise IT customers that must be bridged on three levels: strategic analysis, systems integration, and custom development.

Frank Gilbane deserves much credit for taking a step to connect the worlds of Enterprise Content Management and Web 2.0. The show next April in San Francisco promises to go even further. It's already on my calendar.

Content Management and Web 2.0

Over the past 18 months, I've written quite a bit about how content management relates to RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies. Here's a quick collection of links to some of my most popular posts on the topic:

I'll likely be touching on some of these ideas during the keynote panel here at the Gilbane Conference, scheduled to start today at 3:45. See you there!

Headed to Boston for The Gilbane Conference

I'll be in Boston next week (November 29 through December 1) at The Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies participating in a keynote debate titled Blog, Wiki, and RSS Technology- Are they Enterprise Ready? Applicable? Or a Passing Tempest in a Teacup? Also on the panel will be SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield, ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind, and Gilbane analyst Bill Zoellick.

Should be a lot of fun. If you'll be at show or in town and would like to meet up, drop me a note at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com.

Two New Spanning Salesforce Klips

Since we introduced the first Spanning Salesforce Klip, which delivers Opportunities from Salesforce.com directly to your desktop, we've gotten many requests for additional Klips. Today I'm happy to announce two new Klips for Leads and Cases. You can download all three Klips from KlipFarm:

Together, Spanning Partners and Serence are also developing custom feeds and Klips for our customers. Contact me for more information.