Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007
Using Outlook to manage and read your RSS feeds has several advantages over a stand-alone aggregator, including the ability to place flags and run rules on any RSS feed to which you subscribe.
Some of you might be wondering what is RSS? Really Simple Syndication (usually referred to as RSS) is a way to get updates to websites sent to you instead of having to go back to the web to see if any changes have been made. In this way, you can keep up-to-date on news and information from many different sources in one place. For example, you could subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to be notified when we post a new article. You could also subscribe to the MSNBC Top Headlines RSS feed to keep up to date on top news stories. Many companies are starting to use RSS feeds internally to provide their employees with information that doesn’t need to be e-mailed to the entire company.
In the past, people had to use a stand-alone RSS reader such as FeedDemon or an Outlook add-in such as NewsGator to view their RSS feeds. Outlook 2007 now includes a built-in RSS reader, so now you can treat your RSS the way that you treat your mail (using flags, categories, search folders, rules, etc.) without having to use a separate application.
While Outlook is running, it will periodically check the feeds to which you have subscribed and download any new content. Outlook shows an unread count for each feed next to the folder, so you can quickly see if there are new items you haven’t read yet. Because Outlook downloads the RSS feed data from onto your computer, you can access that data even while offline.
Feeds displayed in Outlook look just like mail folders, and show the unread count next to the feed name
Treat RSS just like E-mail
You can delete posts as you read them or keep posts of interest long after they have been removed from the feed. You can also categorize posts, move them to a separate folder, or flag them for follow up as you please. For example, if you are subscribed to a feed from your company’s website, you can easily keep posts mentioning your projects and discard those that are of no interest to you. Or you can set up rules that move interesting RSS posts to your Inbox to bring them to your attention.
If you decide that a feed is no longer important, you can remove the feed by deleting the feed’s folder in Outlook. Outlook will stop downloading new content for the feed and move all the existing downloaded posts to Deleted Items.
One of the really great things about RSS in Outlook is how well it integrates with some of the other features in the product. For example, I have several RSS feeds to which I subscribe but am not interested in every post they publish. Instead of scrolling through each feed manually, I use a Search Folder that searches my subscribed feeds for posts with keywords on topics of interest. Michael describes how to setup this type of Search Folder in this OfficeHours article.
Common Feeds List
Another handy feature is that RSS in Outlook is that the Outlook feed list can be synchronized with the Windows Common Feed List, which is the list of RSS feeds maintained by Internet Explorer 7 (or later). Outlook prompts you to enable this functionally on first startup, and you can later change that decision through Tools, Options.
Feeds from Internet Explorer and other Common Feeds List clients automatically appear in Outlook
When the synchronize option is turned on, any feed added to either IE or Outlook is added to the other automatically. Deleting a feed from Outlook, however, does not delete the feed from IE, so if you have a feed that is publishing a large volume of posts or very large posts that you do not want filling up your mailbox, you can delete the feed from Outlook but still read it in Internet Explorer. This way you can keep your favorite feeds - the feeds that you always want to download – in Outlook and any feeds you just want to check on occasionally in Internet Explorer. Doing so is especially handy for those who have slow internet connections and who want to minimize RSS-related network activity from Outlook.
Downloading Enclosures and Full Articles
The option to download enclosures is also very convenient. Some RSS feeds have attachments to their RSS items to supplement the content of the article, like a song file, picture, or Office document. Also, some RSS feeds only post minimal data to their RSS items, such as an article summary and a link to the full article. Outlook makes it possible to download the article text as an attachment to the RSS item for viewing offline. By default, both of these features are turned off, but you may activate either feature by editing a feed’s properties. To edit the properties of a feed, select Tools, then Account Manager from the main Outlook window. Select the RSS Feeds tab to see a list of the RSS Feeds Outlook is downloading for you, and use the Change button to modify a feed’s properties.
You can also choose to download attachments or update an item directly from the RSS post in Outlook. Click the information bar at the top of the item to view the full article in your web browser, or download additional content.
Improvements to RSS in Service Pack 1
A number of RSS related improvements were made in the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 (SP1).
Most notably, the downloading of duplicate items was the number one customer issue with RSS in Outlook 2007 and we have made improvements to drastically reduce the number and frequency of duplicates.
Another common issue that was resolved in SP1 is that certain feeds would show all items were posted on 12/31/2006 or 1/1/2007.
Additionally we made performance improvements when synchronizing RSS items to the Common Feed List managed by Internet Explorer. This will speed up Outlook if you keep your Outlook feeds synchronized to the Common Feed List.
There are certainly lots of different ways you can use RSS inside of Outlook 2007, and I hope you find some of these tips and tricks useful as you explore on your own.
Thanks for taking a look at RSS in Outlook,
Christopher Stuart
Outlook Software Design Engineer in Test
