As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, my place of work subscribes to the Summon unified discovery service. Summon quite nicely provides RSS-powered search alerts. Summon uses the RSS 2.0 (or perhaps the 2.0.1?) specification. This is pretty standard. Summon’s feeds work just fine in your average RSS reader.
My place of work uses Blackboard 9, and as I understand it, our university was one of the first to use this version, as it is pretty new.
Despite the fact that we seem to have the newest version of Blackboard available, Blackboard can’t grok the RSS 2.0 specification. In other words, Summon search alert feeds won’t work in Blackboard.
I find this ridiculous and utterly disappointing – the RSS 2.0 specification is not precisely new. According to documents I’ve found, the specifications for RSS 2.0.1 were released in July 2003 – about six and a half years ago.