There was a very interesting post by a 3^rd party consultant who has come up with a simple way to publish salesforce.com data to an RSS Feed.

It’s worth reading the full post, but the logic goes like this. You can create a workflow rule in salesforce which is triggered by an event. That event might be the creation of a new lead, the closing of a deal, or an updated project status. The workflow rule would then merge the event information into an email template which in turn would be sent to an email-to-post address. This is a common feature on most blogging applications including Blogger and Typepad. Now in most cases you’d want to keep this information private, so you’d password protect the blog. From there the blogging application can transform the posts into an RSS feed which can be picked up by any number of readers. All told the author of this post said it took him less than an hour and required no fancy code.

It’d be interesting to hear what other customers are doing with salesforce data and RSS. If you’ve got an use case or a wish list, please add your comments below.