Working with RSS feeds in Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office Outlook has a build-in RSS Feed Reader.

Basically you have an extra folder in your mail file for RSS feeds. Up ‘till now I’ve been a very satisfied user of RSS Bandit, but now I have the new machine I am going all the way ; -).

What I really likes about RSS Bandit by the way was the integration with WBloggar as the editor; you’d just right-click a post in RSS Bandit and it would provide option to ‘reply’ to the post in WBloggar. I miss that in the current setup to be honest, so it’s a bit more cut and paste …

Another thing which I don’t like about the current implementation of RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007 is that the import functions of OMPL seems to be missing the categorization of my feeds. This means I am still in the process of reorganizing and moving my feeds. The upside of this is that I have the chance to clean the up as well.

What I do like is using Word 2007. The ease of use, basically because I’ve worked with it for many years, is great. The blogging view now suports the basic features, nothing fancy but it serves my needs. The only thing missing is categories, so I still have to do an extra step in the Typepad native editor to do that. I hope this feature will be put in once Office 2007 goes RTM …

Anyway RSS Feeds in Outlook ..

This screenshot shows you my Outlook and you can see the RSS Feeds folder :

Post_4_6_2006_outlook_1_1

Reading feeds is just like reading email, from the same application in which a spend quite some time every day. With the preview screen (introduced already in Outlook 2003) I can read the post and if I wish, I can also click the option to view the post in my default browser :

Post_4_6_2006_outlook_2_1

When I double-click the post it opens a new view in which I have all the options to for example categorise, flag (turn it into an action), or email the post :

Post_4_6_2006_outlook_3_1

Another nice option is the “Share This Feed” option which allows the receiver of the mail to subscribe directly to the feed :

Post_4_6_2006_outlook_4_1

Through this I noticed something is still wrong with my blog setup. I always thought my Feedburner was the only option to subscribe (and the desired one). Now it seems that also my native (atom.xml) feed is active. So when people subscribe through a reader that ‘fetches’ the feed from my main page than it ignores the Feedburner one.

Reason why I don’t like it is that it screws up my statistics …

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Peter de Haas
Peter de Haas

Peter wordt gedreven door de grenzeloze mogelijkheden van technologische vooruitgang en heeft meer dan 35 jaar ervaring op het snijvlak van business en IT. Gedurende zijn carrière heeft hij talloze ontwikkelingen zien opkomen en de impact ervan op organisaties en mensen van dichtbij meegemaakt. Met een scherp oog voor het vinden van oplossingen waar anderen obstakels zien, heeft hij zich ontwikkeld tot een vertrouwde expert in digitale transformaties.

Met Designing a Better Workday. als zijn missie helpt Peter individuen, teams en organisaties nieuwe vaardigheden te ontwikkelen en baanbrekende oplossingen te implementeren die werk slimmer, efficiënter en betekenisvoller maken. Zijn inzichten en ervaring maken hem een gewaardeerde bron voor iedereen die technologische trends wil begrijpen en benutten.

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4 reacties

  1. Hi Peter,
    Been reading your Blog for several weeks and find some of the posts extremely useful. Thanks.
    I had similar problems impoting the OPML file I created from IE7 Beta2 which I have been using for reading Blogs. I like the user experience in IE7 and the content is saved offline so I can catch up on the posts I have not read when offline.
    I am with you and hope some of the useful features needed to fully embrace blogging from within Word 2007 are implemented. I am using WordPress and when I post from Word the date of the post is set to 1970 so I have to go into WordPress and correct the Post date.
    Have you tried posting from OneNote? I am going to try that also.

  2. Hi Russ,
    Thanks for the support 😉
    What I did not mention yet (and will do a post about) is that the RSS feed list for IE7 and Outlook are one and the same.
    So every blog I visit and want to subscribe to, I just click the RSS icon in IE 7 and it’s also automaticly added to Outlook 🙂
    I will forward your WordPress “bug” also internally, no promises, but I am quite sure it will be fixed soon.
    I’ve tried blogging from OneNote as well, but basically when you “publish, it starts Word and then it’s the same. The Word Blogging template give you the chance to format, etc.
    I hope I can keep you interesed in the coming weeks, lots to blog about anyway …

  3. Hi Peter, is there a way to have the unread count in the Outlook inbox not include the RSS feeds? I have hundereds of RSS feeds that I can’t look at each day, and it drives the unread count for the inbox up, which is not what I think the feature should do.

  4. Alan,
    I think by default the unread items for your inbox do not show the unread RSS feeds; at least not in my inbox and I have not changed the default settings.
    When you look at the first picture in this post, it shows 18 unread items in my inbox and this is purely the inbox, so excluding RSSfeeds which have some 1000+ unread items.
    I will look into this and get back to you …

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