search.subscribe.share in outlook 2007 : RSS Aggregation

Outlook, RSS, & the user-agent string

michaelaffronti — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:46:00 GMT

One of our dedicated MVP's, Patrick Schmid, reported in his post here that:

If you provide an RSS feed for your blog, then there is a good chance that you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great tool to get accurate statistics on how many subscribers an RSS feed has for example. Unfortunately, FeedBurner doesn’t count any subscriptions from Outlook 2007 or IE7. It looks like FeedBurner just doesn’t know that Outlook 2007/IE7 can be real RSS readers. This is a pretty annoying problem for me, as I would assume that a large number of you are subscribing to my blog via Outlook 2007.

For Outlook 2007 we will unfortunately not be able to report any custom user agent string for our RSS aggregation. Due to the way we integrate with IE across many parts of the application (the WININET stack is the underlying infrastructure for all of Outlook’s internet communication), we cannot easily and safely change the way we broadcast ourselves when connecting to external servers. To do so would require a fundamental change in the way the WININET stack is called from Outlook and could affect all of the Office applications. The scope of this fix is unfortunately outside of what we can provide this release.

We are going to work with Patrick, IE, and the Feedburner folks to see if there is anything else we can do.

Thanks Patrick for helping us diagnose this.

RSS & AutoArchive in Outlook 2007 – part 2

michaelaffronti — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:19:00 GMT

A few days ago I posted on how to use AutoArchive in Outlook 2007 to help manage the size impact of your RSS Feeds on your Exchange mailbox. One of the downsides to using AutoArchive is that there is no easy way to apply a defined set of parameters to a number of RSS Feed folders at once – folders can either use the global setting or they need to have their parameters set individually.

Here's a trick that I use to workaround that limitation and keep my RSS feeds down, along with archiving the content should I ever need to find it with Outlook 2007's Instant Search (plug plug).

Create a new .PST file from File: New: Outlook Data File. I called mine "RSS Archive".
Select File: Archive from the menu.
In the resulting dialog, select Archive this folder and all subfolders:
Click on the "RSS Feeds" folder.
Choose a date that you would like to archive from in Archive items older than. I typically choose a date that's two or three days ago.
Select your new PST in Archive File:
Click OK to run Archive.

This will archive all of the RSS Feed items out of your default store that are older than the set date, and move them into the .PST file you created. This one-off run of AutoArchive does not change any of the settings you may have on the individual feed folders, it's just a quick way to get RSS Feed items out of your Exchange store. You can run it whenever you need, just follow the steps above (minus creating the new PST).

You've reduced the amount of RSS Feed items in your default store while retaining them in an archive PST – sweet!

RSS & AutoArchive in Outlook 2007

michaelaffronti — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:53:00 GMT

The volume of content on some RSS Feeds can be very high. When you add more RSS Feeds to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you might discover that the size of your Microsoft Exchange mailbox (mailbox: Location on a Microsoft Exchange server where your e-mail is delivered. Your administrator sets up a mailbox for each user. If you designate a personal folder file as your e-mail delivery location, messages are routed to it from your mailbox.) or Personal Folders file (.pst) (Personal Folders file (.pst): Data file that stores your messages and other items on your computer. You can assign a .pst file to be the default delivery location for e-mail messages. You can use a .pst to organize and back up items for safekeeping.) is quickly increasing in size.

The AutoArchive feature in Outlook provides an automatic way to delete items older than a certain date. Many RSS Feeds include news or other time-sensitive information. The need to keep older items is usually not as important as keeping your e-mail messages.

More about AutoArchive

AutoArchive is on by default and runs automatically at scheduled intervals, archiving and, if specified, removing older items from all Outlook folders. Older items are those that reach a specificed archiving age.

By default, Outlook creates the archive files in the following location:

Microsoft Windows Vista
drive:\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst
Microsoft Windows XP or 2k3
drive:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst

After Outlook archives items, you can access the items directly from Archive Folders in the Navigation Pane in Outlook. To see the Archive Folders in the Navigation Pane, on the Go menu, click Folder List.

When you open Archive Folders, you will see that Outlook maintains your existing folder structure. If there is a parent folder above the folder you chose to archive, the parent folder is created in the archive file, but within the parent folder only items that meet AutoArchive criteria are archived. If you decide you want archived items moved back into your main mailbox, you can import all the items from the archive file into their original folders or into other folders you specify, or you can manually move or copy items, including dragging between folders.

Customizing AutoArchive for RSS items

There are two sets of AutoArchive settings — global settings and per-folder settings.

Global settings
Called default settings, determine whether AutoArchive runs at all and what it does by default with the items in any Outlook folder except Contacts, which is exempt from AutoArchive.
Per-folder settings
override default settings so you can AutoArchive individual folders differently

If you don't specify AutoArchive settings for a specific folder, the folder is not archived. AutoArchive settings apply to the current mailbox only. This means if you select a folder in your Exchange account, and then set Global settings for AutoArchive, the settings apply only to the Exchange account.

Turn on AutoArchive

Although AutoArchive is on by default, you can turn off and turn on the feature when required. AutoArchive must be turned on for the procedures in this article to work.

If you want to use AutoArchive for RSS Feeds folders only, we recommend that you modify the default settings so that AutoArchive is turned on, but takes no action except on the specific folders you configure. This helps prevent accidental archiving or deletion from folders that you did not intend to affect.

On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Other tab, click AutoArchive.

Select the Run AutoArchive every n days check box.
Enter a number between 1 and 60 in the box for how often you want AutoArchive to run.

To effectively use AutoArchive with RSS Feeds folders, we recommend that you use a value between 1 and 7 days. This is not the number of days that items are kept, but how often AutoArchive runs. The more frequently you run AutoArchive, the more accurate your retention periods are.
Under During Archive, clear the Delete Expired Items (e-mail folders only) and Archive or delete old items check boxes.

Clearing these check boxes helps prevent accidentally performing AutoArchive actions on folders that you do not intend to affect. Later in this article, you specify AutoArchive settings on a per-folder basis.

If you already use AutoArchive and some of your folders use the default global settings, it is not necessary for you to change your settings.

Specify AutoArchive settings for each RSS Feed folder

In the Navigation Pane, right-click the RSS Feeds folder you want to specify settings for, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu.
Click the AutoArchive tab.
Click Archive this folder using these settings.
In Clean out items older than n period , where n represents the numeric value of 1 to 999, and period equals months, days, or weeks, enter the maximum length of time you want RSS items to be kept.
Click Permanently delete old items.
Click OK.
Repeat for each RSS Feeds folder that contains items you want to automatically delete.

Manually run AutoArchive

On the File menu, click Archive.
Specify whether to archive all folders using their AutoArchive settings (that is, either the default settings or per-folder settings you specified for individual folders) or whether to archive an individual folder using the options you specify in this dialog box.

RSS in Outlook - upgrading from Beta 2 to B2TR

michaelaffronti — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:01:00 GMT

With the Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh now live on the web, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the best way to get your RSS feeds up and running after you upgrade. The B2TR installation is actually a patch that installs on top of the original Beta 2 and makes upgrading very simple.

In B2TR we made a significant amount of changes to the way that are RSS Feeds are stored internally inside of Outlook. These changes were made to deal with several cases where users could receive duplicate items for an individual post, have duplicate feed folders, or even experience the loss of feeds or sync breaking when using an Exchange account.

If you've got a lot of feeds in the original Beta 2 and are going to be installing the B2TR patch, we recommend a few steps to get your RSS setup using the new architecture.

Upgrade Steps

In Beta2, export your feeds as an OPML file.
Patch to the B2TR.
Run Outlook with the /cleansharing command. Do this by going to Start: Run, then type "Outlook /cleansharing".
1. This will remove ALL of the RSS Feed subscriptions from Outlook.
2. It will not remove the folders or the data, but if you go to the Account Manager's RSS tab (Tools: Accounts, RSS) you will not see any more feeds listed.
3. This is an important step since it clears out all the feeds using the old architecture.
4. Note: this will also remove all of the subscriptions to Microsoft SharePoint sites and Internet Calendar subscriptions.
You can now delete the folders for your old RSS Feeds since the next step will create new folders.
1. If you're on Exchange give this operation a few minutes to sync to your server and other Outlook clients.
Import your OPML file.

Those steps should get you working cleanly with the improved RSS architecture in the B2TR. If you've got any comments or issues please use your normal support channel (if you're a corporate beta user) or drop me a comment below.

Internet Explorer 7 Integration

Outlook B2TR's integration with the IE 7 RSS Platform will require the IE7 RC1 build for WindowsXP, or Windows Vista RC1, in order for the sync to work correctly.

Thanks! Good luck with the B2TR build.

Paul Thurrott review of Office B2TR

michaelaffronti — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:40:00 GMT

Another great review by Paul Thurrott over on the Windows SuperSite: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office2007_beta2_tr.asp.

He's got some great information on Outlook and talks specifically about the new Instant Search functionality.

Dupes part deux

michaelaffronti — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:12:00 GMT

There's been some conversations going on about how Outlook is handling duplicate RSS items and what that means for bloggers. Sorry for the confusion – what we've done in Outlook 2007 recently around duplicates is to reduce the erroneous amount that occur because of the incorrect way that we interpret changes in the XML, along with several problems when syncing multiple Outlook clients against an Exchange store.

As Brandon points out, duplicate items in our Outlook 2007 Beta 2 was a big problem and we've been working to solve the programmatic issues behind them. In our latest builds we've seen virtually no duplicates downloaded from feeds, especially with multiple Outlook 2007 clients syncing against an Exchange account and even syncing with IE 7 and the Windows RSS platform.

This does not mean anything has to change on the part of how bloggers post and their methodology around updating old posts. My use of "best practices" in my previous post should have read "one recommended way" of posting updated content.

If a content provider modifies a previously posted blog entry and then an Outlook 2007 user downloads the updated post, we will verify if the original item still exists in the Outlook folder. If it does, meaning the user has not deleted the item, then we will automatically update the content of the old post with the new content from the feed. If the user has deleted the item then we will not download a new item to replace. This adheres to the delete model I described in my previous post.

Think of it like this:

A blogger writes five posts; A, B, C, D, E.
Outlook user downloads A, B, C, D, E.

Outlook user deletes a few posts and is left with A, C, D.

The blogger updates the content of B, C. For simplicity call them B1, C1. He also writes post F.

Outlook downloads the XML and sees the changes.

Outlook ignores the updates of the posts the user has explicitly deleted and updates the content of the ones that still exist automatically, leaving the user with posts A, C1, D, F.

If you don't like this delete model where removing a post from Outlook ignores all further updates on that individual item, there is an option to disable it. Toggling this option causes deletes to be non-destructive, and in the above scenario the user would see a new item downloaded for post B1 even though he deleted the original item in Outlook.

I hope that clears some of the confusion up. I'm happy to entertain any more questions you have, either shoot me them in a comment or send them over email.

Thanks!

Dupes be gone!

michaelaffronti — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:28:00 GMT

Duplicate items are an RSS aggregator's worst enemy, and many of the dedicated folks who are using Outlook 2007 Beta 2 know we did not do a great job in that build of handling the many ways that dupes can occur.

Since the Beta 2 build we've made numerous improvements to the RSS architecture around our ability to deal with duplicate items. This includes changes in both the individual download logic for feeds, the server sync if you're in an Exchange environment, and the delete behavior for individual items.

When you delete an individual RSS item from the feed's folder in Outlook 2007, we take it as "I'm done with this item and don't want to see it again." This means if the post continues to exist in the XML file we get from the content publisher for another few days (or however long it takes to roll off the end of the file), we will not download it again. Read Status is also handled the same way; mark an item as Read and its status will not change in this scenario.

If a blogger or content publisher modifies a post and wants their readers to be sure they see it again, they should follow the best practice of re-posting the new content. This will create a new GUID and cause Outlook (and other aggregators that follow this delete model) to see it as a new item and download it as appropriate.

Minor or non-content changes made to existing items in the feed's XML - especially random tags used by a specific aggregator or inserted automatically by the syndication engine - will not cause Outlook to see it as a new item and download a duplicate. We saw a large number of duplicate feed items in Beta 2 because of this and our improvements to the update logic for individual posts is designed to handle this. The specific logic for determining which fields to use for change detection in Outlook is now the same as IE 7.

so it begins...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:35:00 GMT

9:36am, just ran into Hans (former Outlook PM now Walter Cronkite apprentice) and am sitting in the main room of the conference. We've got a Windows Live booth outside of the conference room that's got a few Vista demo machines and it's also where Joe and I will be demoing Outlook and Word 2007. Check it out!

Gnomedex 6.0 baby!

michaelaffronti — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:52:00 GMT

Gnomedex 6.0 starts tonight! Last year was a blast and I'm looking forward to attending this weekend. I'll be there with a bunch of other folks from Microsoft representing Office, XBox, Windows Live, Vista, and a bunch of other teams. We'll have a little lounge area set up where you can come by, chat with us, and catch a quick game on an XBox 360. I'll have a laptop with the latest build of Outlook on it, so come to say hi and see a quick demo of our RSS aggregation, Internet Calendaring and Sharing, Instant Search, and all of the cool new features in our product. See you tomorrow!

Blogging from Word 2007

michaelaffronti — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:18:00 GMT

My friend and colleague Joe Friend over in Word 2007 land (actually just upstairs from my office) has released the details of some awesome new functionalty enabled in the Word 2007 Beta 2:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx

That's right - blogging from Word 2007 is here! Joe's post is very detailed and includes some great screen shots. I just started using the tool and it is wicked cool. Stop by his blog and check it out! Great job Joe, Krista, and the rest of the Word team.

RSS for concert lovers...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:53:00 GMT

I love going to concerts, but finding tickets to shows is often a pain - especially those that get sold out in a few minutes and you can't find anything on TicketMaster. My friend Hernan is an avid concert-goer as well, and recently told me a of a great way that he used RSS in Outlook to help him get tickets to a recent show here in Seattle. I'll let him explain...

"I wanted to go see the Ryan Adams concert but it was SOLD OUT. I went to Craigslist only to find many more ticket buyers than sellers. I wanted to make sure to be the first person to respond to a post without having to remember to check the site every 5 min.

RSS feeds to the rescue! From Craigslist, I subscribed to an RSS feed based on my query terms. Pretty sweet!

However, the key was being able to change the delivery to the location to my Inbox so I would see the post right away. (I never remember to check my RSS folders.)

Sure enough, a few hours later I saw a post come into my Inbox, I responded right away, and had tickets to the show!

Outlook, RSS, and the corporate environment

michaelaffronti — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:49:00 GMT

Lot's of folks have been using the B1TR of Outlook 12 in corporate environments, and have asked what kind of interactions we'll have between RSS and their systems.

By default, Outlook 12 delivers new RSS subscriptions to sub-folders underneath the "RSS Feeds" root folder. This folder lives in your default store for each profile, which means if you're connected to an Exchange server they will be delivered there and it will count against your quota for size and item count. This default behavior gives us several things for free:

automatic roaming of the RSS subscriptions across any connected Outlook 12 client
item-level roaming across the same O12 clients, any mobile devices, and OWA

For some corporate environements this is a completely acceptable default setup, since they have large or no quotas or no retention policies. For Exchange environments where an admin would like more control over their users RSS experience and its impact on storage and privacy, the following types of settings can be deployed:

Basic functionality: Admins, if they desire, can completely turn off RSS functionality in Outlook 12.

Delivery Location: Admins can easily deploy the setting so that RSS feeds must be delivered to a PST and not the Exchange store. This can eliminate concerns that RSS will severly impact the storage quotas of your users' mailboxes.
Feeds: Admins can now also deploy a set of RSS feeds to users. You can imagine an admin wanting all of their users to have the company's eNewsletter feed and deploying it to the desktop. When deploying feeds, an admin can also control most of the properties for that subscription, including the ability of the user to delete that feed from Outlook.
AutoArchive: At the client level, since RSS in Outlook is just like mail, you can apply and/or deploy custom AutoArchive settings to RSS feed folders. In my case, I've setup AA rules on my RSS feed folders so that items older than 7 days get deleted automatically.

10x10 - an amazing use of RSS

michaelaffronti — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:40:00 GMT

http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html

From their site:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

The site is amazing and I've been hooked on trying to use it to keep up on top news stories. Pictures are definitely worth a thousand words.

RSS in Outlook 2007 Q & A

michaelaffronti — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:33:00 GMT

Many of you have posted great comments and questions on our RSS work. I wanted to take a few minutes to answer some of them. If you have any more please let me know.

Is there any way to import feeds from OPML into Outlook 12?

Yes, it's built right into our Import/Export wizard, under File: Import and Export. You can also Export as OPML as well.

Great ideas Michael. I've been having some issues with the aggregator and certain feeds but will re-evaluate this with the B1TR build and see how I go.

There are several known bugs in the initial Beta 1 release in our duplication detection and item update code. We've resolved many of them in the B1TR build and I hope you can retry your feeds in it.

Will there be any way to import existing RSS repositories into your folder structure? For example, I'm currently using Omea Reader. If I switched to using the new Outlook RSS reader, I'd like to import all the posts I've previously downloaded into Outlook for indexing and future reference.

Unfortunatley there is no way to import that actuall RSS items from another applcation into Outlook. The only thing you can do is import the RSS feeds themselves.

Will feeds sync to a mobile device, and be included as part of the DirectPush updates?

This is a great question. RSS items are just like mail items when they live in Exchange, so they sync up through the server and down to any device or client that connects to the store. To be clear, Outlook 2007 is the one doing the downloading and not Exchange, meaning you have to have the client open and running to get updates on your mobile device. I do this now on my smartphone, and it's a great way to read RSS on the go.

Can you subscribe to Authenticated feeds in Outlook 12?

We do not support storing third-party credentials inside of Outlook to connect to authenticated RSS feeds. We support BASIC and NLTM pass-thru, so you can connect to internal SharePoint feeds for example and they will use your Windows creds correctly.

Hope that answers some of your questions. Please keep 'em coming!

Gettin' crafty with reading RSS feeds

michaelaffronti — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:18:00 GMT

There are several cool ways you leverage Outlook's folder management and search infrastructure to improve the way you view RSS feeds inside the application. They range from the simple, like creating subfolders, to the complex, like using search folders to find key terms. Here's a look at some of the ways I use these techniques to read my RSS feeds in Outlook...

Folder Management

The simplest thing you can do is use Outlook's standard folder management to organize your feeds by criteria you choose. Here, I have added a few organizational folders for my feeds to group them by type:

This lets me easily group the numerous feeds I can be subscribed to at any one point in time.

Search Folders

Outlook 12 ships with a powerful new Search platform for explicit queries that is also used for Search Folders. You can now perform powerful searches on RSS feeds using the Full Text Engine and easily monitor thousands of feed items for specific keywords.

I subscribe to approximatley one hundred feeds in my default Outlook profile, and there is obviously no way to read all of the new items during the course of a day. What I've done is create two Search Folders to help me out:

Search Folder 1: "Today's News"
This Search Folder queries all of my feeds and displays just the new, unread posts from today. Whenever I have a few spare minutes I love to go in this folder and just read the news from my favorite blogs and ezines. As I read an article the item disappears out of the search folder since it's read/unread status automatically changes to unread.

To create this search folder, it's a simple setup using our Search Folder criteria selector:

When you view the Search Folder, the best part is being able to group by folder, as I then get a really easy roll-up view to view today's RSS items:

Search Folder 2: "RSS Watcher"
I subscribe to lots of RSS feeds from sites that can potentially be discussing Microsoft Office, my product Outlook, or any of several topics that I consider really important (search technologies, RSS, tagging, etc.). Instead of having to wade through all of them, or even do explicit searches inside of each feed's folder, I have a Search Folder that I call my "RSS Watcher".

This Search Folder goes over all of the feeds that I'm subscribed to, and only pulls the unread items out that have certain keywords in them:

Which results in a nice roll-up view that I then sort-by folder:

Hope those provide some interesting ways to think about how RSS aggregation in Outlook can more tightly integrated into your daily information workflow. In my next post I'll focus on how to use Rules and Alerts to easily bring relevent feeds to a specific folder, and enable a bunch of other cool scenarios.