A consulting start-up is RSS-enabling Salesforce.com's customer relationship management (CRM) service, aggregating subscribers' data and helping users reduce information overload.

Spanning Partners has launched Spanning Salesforce.com 2.0, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) service that delivers sales information to subscribers' PCs and mobile devices without firing up a browser or wading through email for updates.

Subscribers can sign-up for Spanning's service by clicking on the RSS buttons at the company's website and run popular aggregators such as FeedDemon, NewsGator or NetNewsWire.

Spanning founder Charlie Wood, previously NewsGator's vice president of enterprise solutions, told The Register his service helps solve the problem of information overload and access to data in enterprise applications.

In Salesforce.com’s case, subscribers must use either check their data by taking the time to go online through a browser or by receiving alerts via email, raising the problem of sorting and finding data as more email arrives.

"Aggregation is getting solved by NewsGator and Microsoft, but the piece that was missing was having enterprise software applications RSS-enabled," Wood said.

"RSS specifically for Salesforce.com lets users get at their data which ever way they want. Right now you can do on the Web, there's an Outlook version and a mobile version. RSS is a natural extension of that. CRM can benefit from RSS."

Seven RSS feeds are available covering unread leads, open opportunities, opportunities for this quarter, opportunities for the next quarter, open cases, open escalations and new documents. These links are free; however, Spanning will charge Salesforce subscribers to build RSS links to customized implementations of the software.

Apparently Salesforce.com has no immediate plans of its own to open its online service to RSS, according to Wood. ®

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