A while back, there
were a some posts about NewsGator
being “too easy” to use, and people resisting reading RSS feeds in Outlook for
this reason. We’ve discussed the feature set of NewsGator many times…but let’s
talk more about integrating RSS with Outlook.
Today, some might
argue that mail and news are indeed two separate things; since RSS isn’t a real
part of people’s daily responsibilities, it’s not a big deal to open another
application to read news.
But what about moving
forward, with RSS becoming much more ubiquitous every day? You’ll have RSS feeds
from weblogs you read, maybe feeds from your internal build or bug tracking
systems, feeds from news sites, feeds from your product’s support forums. It
integrates into your work; it becomes part of your routine. At this point, when
RSS news is as much a part of your day as email, wouldn’t you want them all
integrated into a central information management point? Outlook is the obvious
place to see it all.
You’ll have information from multiple sources – your
email, mailing lists, exchange public folders, RSS feeds – all in one
place. No need to explicitly convert
between them. You want to email a weblog
post to a friend? You click forward. You
want to post a mailing list item to your weblog? You click “Post to weblog.” You
want to reply via email to a weblog post? You click Reply.
And it’s all here today.
Shameless plug, but I think your analysis is spot on. RSS as a format will likely be applied to all sorts of tools that are used to communicate, and integration of aggregators with standard tools for communicating is key.
I couldn’t possibly agree more.
I am a big user of NewsGator. Greg Reinacker has put forward some comments on why he believes bringing all RSS sources into Outlook is a good idea and why I use it. Look beyond what may appear a plug…[more]
Everything about what you wrote Greg is exactly why I love NewsGator more than a stand alone reader. I’m waiting for the day that literally EVERY information source that I need or want to monitor offers an RSS feed so that I can then just use NewsGator and Outlook to deal with them all. In fact, one more great thing that I started doing the other day was copy postings into Exchange Public Folders. I currently forward posts around to our operations staff, but equally being able to BCC the post to an ‘archive’ folder for future searching is simply priceless.
A new idea just popped into my head too as I was writing this. I find myself, when forwarding/archiving posts, wanting to ‘read-in’/import a particular article from some blog somewhere, but at the same time I don’t really want to subscribe to that person’s blog. What about having some way to do a temp folder and a NG specific address bar that would import the current contents of a feed into that temp folder so that I could then forward that particular post, but not have to subscribe and unsubscribe (and I can deal with having to delete the ‘other’ posts that I don’t care about – it’s all about temporarily getting a feed into Outlook).
Good thought, Jim…I have added it to the list. Thanks!
I blogged my parents response to using NewsGator here: http://www.gwyncole.com/blogs/developer/archives/000059.html. They absolutly love NewsGator!
Hmmm… Reminds me of the way Outlook Express integrates newsgroups. The big difference is that you can subscribe to the information you care about!
I read more news with NewsGator too, but I read it faster so it’s a wash (except for the fact that I ingest more news). With NewsGator, the overhead of getting news and reading it is SO much lower than other methods.
Tim Bray is in sales mode and wants to know What’s the RSS Soundbite? My advice would be to load up NewsGator and pitch RSS as broadcast email….[more]