A few days ago I finally got to install the new Newsgator Enterprise Server (NGE for short). NGS is a web/Exchange based RSS aggregator that allow central management for your enterprises RSS reading. IF you’re familiar with their current web based offering (Newsgator Online – NGO for short) then you’ve seen the interface. They’ve taken what they learned from NGO and rolled it into a really great enterprise offering.

Once we got it installed managing users/settings is very straight forward. (The installer isn’t near finished so it’s hard to say too much about it at this point. I’d guess that an average install will take between 15-30 minutes once it’s all worked out, not bad at all for an enterprise piece of software.) You designate a user (or multiple users) as administrators. This changes the basic interface subtly by adding a “Admin” tab at the top. All basic administration is done here, with the exception of marking users as admins (you have to use the other tools I mentioned above for that). Once you’re setup as admin creating accounts for your users is straightforward. You search for the user (NGE integrates with AD/Exchange so all your users are already there) and enable them for NGE. Once enabled you can allow the user to sync their subscriptions with Exchange (more on that later).

The first thing you and/or your users will want to do is subscribe to some RSS feeds. The user has many options here: they can browse through a list of pre-provided feeds, manually enter feeds by pasting in the feeds URL, or import their current NGO feeds using OMPL. Our “power user”, Brad Feld, had more than 450 feeds that he imported from NGO using OPML, and while we did have a little glitch at first with his account (unrelated to the number of feeds), NGE handled all 450 of his feeds very well. Hopefully some kind of auto-subscribe redirect like NGO has is coming (making subscribing and using the system much easier for users).

Once you’re up and running everything works basically as you expect (again the user experience is almost exactly like NGO). While we did hit a few bugs, things seemed to be very stable and fast. NGE is generally meant to be run inside your corporate firewall but if you’re got remote/traveling users it’s easy enough to open port 80 (or in our case 443 – remember the authentication?) in your firewall and allow external access to your users. Fortunately Newsgator gets it and supports Firefox (although you either have to enable NTLM authentication or provide your domain user/password – a minor issue).

One of the real powers with NGE is it’s integration with Microsoft Exchange. Integration works as expected, mirroring what you have in NGE to your Exchange account. Each feed is given it’s own folder in Exchange, all below a top level folder that the admin creates (although Newsgator was uncertain if that top level folder could actually be a subfolder of Inbox – hopefully it will be able too). Coming for the release (but not in this beta yet) is the ability for the administrator to set expiration for posts that get dropped in Exchange. For administrators this will be huge as it will keep Billy from filling his mailbox with hundreds and thousands of unread posts. With the integration messages in Exchange get marked as read when read in the web interface but I wish there was an option to delete them from Exchange after reading – this again would help keep mailbox sizes down quite a bit.

All-in-all Newsgator Enterprise is a powerful offering with a solid and simple UI (especially given it’s a 1.0 product). If you’re looking for an easy and simple way to provide a web based RSS feed aggregator for your enterprise look no further.