RSS Notification of Software Updates
Senior Project: 2005-2006
Peter Chang, Jeffrey Fryer, Kelly Kaveny and Scott Kaveny
IBM Corporation has many areas of business, including software, hardware and
service. The software business produces numerous software applications for many
different customers. The Software Delivery and Fulfillment Division (SDF) is
constantly searching for ways to improve the IBM customer experience by
providing easier ways of delivering software and by controlling the cost
of this delivery. One interesting idea is to improve the way IBM notifies
customers of an update for any available software product.
The goal of this project was to facilitate distribution of software updates to
customers by using a modified version of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
RSS is currently used to distribute web page content including headlines,
links, and images from various sources. It is mostly used for news web pages
to condense news updates into an easily accessible format. The modified version
of RSS notifies customers of pending updates and delivers these updates to the
customer securely.
The software has two major components: a client residing on a customer machine
and a server residing at the IBM site. The customer RSS client queries the
server periodically for any new updates. If an update is available and the
customer is authorized to receive it, the client will be notified and the
update will be downloaded immediately, downloaded at a customer-specified time,
or the customer will simply be notified that an update is available, all
depending on customer-specific settings.
 HAL Server
HAL Client
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