October 16, 2007

Michael Affronti

RSS Feeds can grow to become RSS weeds — if you're not careful. But with the folder management and search capabilities of Office Outlook 2007, you can get control of your feeds before they get control of you.

There are several cool ways you leverage Outlook's folder management and search engine 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 inside the feeds. 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 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 that I subscribe to at any one point in time. However, this gets unwieldy when you have lots and lots of feeds. The above screen shot is my work profile, but here’s a shot of my home profile’s RSS folder:

I certainly don’t want to be moving all those folders around all the time, and having that many makes it hard to read the new items since I’ve got to visit each folder to do so.

How can it be easier? Enter the world of Search Folders…

I've created 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 e-zines. As I read an article the item disappears out of the search folder since its "read/unread" status automatically changes to "read."

Creating this search folder is simple when using our Search Folder criteria selector:

When you view the Search Folder, the best part is being able to use the Arranged By: Folder view, since you can get a cool collapsed rollup of all the new items in each feed:

Search Folder 2: "RSS Watcher"

I subscribe to lots of RSS Feeds from sites that could be discussing Microsoft Office, 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 rollup view that I then sort by folder:

Hope these tips provide some interesting ways to think about how RSS Feeds can be more easily managed in Outlook and more tightly integrated into your daily work. Thanks!

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.