RSSBus feeds Proto your business data | April 13, 2007
by Byron Binkley
A while back we did a blog post showing how Proto could consume a rich RSS feed made with Yahoo! Pipes to create an apartment searching and management application. I then learned about RSSBus from a Proto user’s blog, and I got excited about the opportunities that would open up if Proto could access RSS feeds of business data. There’s a good post by Prashanth Rai talking about this very topic and the enterprise information ecosystem of the future if you want additional background.
At ETech we had a chance to meet the RSSBus team and saw first hand how they deliver on turning proprietary data and applications into RSS feeds. Since Proto’s goal is to turn structured data and services into useful applications, I had to check it out first hand.
Here’s what I came up with:
In many businesses, client entertainment is a substantial cost. Managers, CFOs, and COOs would like to know if the $2,000 wine bill in Atlanta actually helped their salesperson close a deal. And since RSSBus can output feeds of the relevant data, Proto can provide the front-end to manage and report on the data sources to show the relationship between expenses and revenues.
To do this, we used RSSBus feeds that could be generated for:
- American Express charges for a given user account
- Salesforce.com Opportunities
- QuickBooks Expense categories or a Google spreadsheet with a standard list of categories
- A set of files with the Amex charges tagged by users (created using Proto) that link each expense to an Opportunity in a particular category
- A feed of booked revenues for opportunities (either from Salesforce.com or QuickBooks)
The illustration below shows how these data sets come together:
Next, I'll walk through the specific applications.
