May 14, 2007

Michael Affronti

This week's Office Hours columnist is an expert in all things Outlook. Michael Affronti explains how you can make the most of your RSS content all from the comfort of Outlook 2007.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers, and you can view all of your RSS content in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Using RSS, publishers can make content and updates available for download by subscribers automatically. The content on all Web sites is not available as an RSS Feed, but the list is growing daily. A user subscribes to an RSS feed using an application with RSS aggregation capabilities, such as Outlook 2007.

What's RSS doing in Outlook?

You spend all day in Outlook, right? We know that besides Internet Explorer and the actual Windows Operating System, Outlook is one of the applications that our users spend a majority of their time in when using their computer. Now think about how often you check the news by reading a bunch of web sites, whether at home or at work.

You know the drill: Open Internet Explorer, go to your Favorites, open the site, find where the newest articles are posted, find one that's interesting, click it, read it, go back, read the next one, etc. Rinse and repeat with each site that has the content you like to keep track of. And if you find an article worth sharing with anyone, then you have to copy the URL, switch back to Outlook, open a new email, paste the URL in, compose your own text, and send it on its way.

We decided that was way too much work.

Since almost any news, blog, or forum worth its salt pushes out an RSS feed, we decided to bring the news to you by putting it right inside Outlook. You can now easily subscribe, read, and share information from all of these sources by bringing them into Outlook using RSS.

RSS in Outlook is not just about making the process of keeping up on E! Hollywood News easier at work. Think about the number of ways that companies use to post information internally to its employees, like internal blogs, intranets, news sites, clipping services, and so on, many of which are hosted on content platforms that all push out an RSS feed.

 Note   You can find a detailed description of how to get started by actually subscribing to feeds in the article, Introduction to RSS.

But I've subscribed to too many feeds — now I'm overloaded. Help!

You can easily subscribe to WAY more feeds than you'll ever have time to read. Case-in-point, I have 200+ feeds in my current Outlook profile at work, and more than 500+ in my profile at home. How can I possibly deal with that much information? The answer is to let Outlook easily find the information you're interested in from those feeds. Instead of spending time creating complex folder hierarchies that you then put the individual RSS Feed folders in (Technology, Food, and so on), and then still have to click inside of to read each feeds' contents, why not use our brand-new and ultra-fast Instant Search to do the work for you.

I have a set of Search Folders that accomplish this for me, helping me easily pull the important content out of the thousands of articles that come down from my feeds. For example, my Daily News search folder is where I go each morning while I drink my coffee to find out what's going on in the world, while my Office Watch folder alerts me with an unread item whenever someone's blog mentions any keyword matching the query in the folder, like "outlook," "office," "rss," and so on. I've posted a simple set of instructions on creating these two search folders on my blog; try 'em out!

What about the size of my Inbox?

The more RSS Feeds you subscribe to, the more you space you take up in your mailbox (the Outlook file that contains your Inbox and all other folders). If you're a home user connected to a regular POP e-mail account then the size of the mailbox is limited only by your hard drive space, but for many folks their work account has limited size maintained by their administrator. Or, maybe you just want to get rid of all the old content from feeds since many publish several articles a day.

What can I do?

There are two things you can do, either separately or together, that can help manage the amount of space that RSS items take up in your mailbox. The first is just move them to a separate Outlook Data File on your hard drive. Since this data file is not kept in your "main" mailbox, the RSS items won't contribute to the mailbox's overall size and therefore not cause you to hit your size limit. Once you've created this separate data file, it's just a simple drag-and-drop to move an RSS folder from your current mailbox to the new data file. Outlook is smart and will recognize that the feed's folder has moved, and you'll continue to get updates in this new location.

You can also use AutoArchive to automatically move or delete items from RSS folders. AutoArchive is like Outlook's personal mailbox maid, and it can be easily customized to accommodate the types of content you receive in Outlook. For example, on several feeds I have AutoArchive delete all the content once week, since these are typically news feeds whose content is not that important to keep around. Some of the feeds I subscribe to from inside of work I will have AutoArchive actually copy to a separate data file so I can permanently retain them.

 Note   I wrote a post about AutoArchive that describes how to do all of this in detail. Check it out and let us know if these techniques help!

I hope some of these techniques help you read your RSS feeds more effectively and manage the impact they may have on your information overload.

Happy aggregating!

About the author

Michael Affronti is a program manager on the Office Outlook team at Microsoft. Over the past three years he has worked on a variety of projects within Outlook, including RSS Aggregation, Instant Search, Internal Mail, and online calendaring. When he's not working on his pet project of creating a single RSS feed for the entire Internet, you can often find Michael on the soccer field, rollerblading, or enjoying Seattle's numerous restaurants and nightlife.