Chapter 16. Using RSS Feeds

This chapter explains one of the new features in Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007: Really Simple Syndication (RSS)—the ability to integrate external information provided by content publishers (such as news Web sites) into a folder in Office Outlook 2007. The information is transmitted in a particular XML format (described as an RSS feed). To use this information, you configure Outlook 2007 to subscribe to the RSS feeds that provide the stories or information you want. These stories (or other RSS-provided information) are stored in a feed-specific folder under the RSS Feeds folder in Outlook 2007.

Understanding RSS

RSS is essentially an XML-based means to format news stories and other dynamically changing Web content so that RSS-aware software applications can access and retrieve this content automatically. Many Web browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer®, have a built-in RSS-aware component (sometimes called a news aggregator or a news reader) that can connect to RSS feed locations and retrieve RSS-formatted content.

As the RSS format was developed, there have been multiple (sometimes competing) specifications for RSS, with multiple vendors and industry groups disagreeing on which specification to use. Fortunately for Outlook 2007 users, dealing with the different specifications is an issue for application developers—in Outlook 2007, you simply paste in the URL to the RSS feed that you want to retrieve, and Outlook 2007 takes care of the rest.

RSS is also referred to as Web content syndication, where users subscribe to the content they want from news sites (and other Web sites providing dynamic information). In this case, a subscription is not like signing up for a newsletter, where you have to provide an e-mail address for the information to be sent to. Rather, to subscribe to RSS feeds, you only have to locate the URL for the specific feed that you want and configure your RSS reader (in this case, Outlook 2007) to connect to that URL. The RSS reader will automatically retrieve the information (news articles, or other dynamic content) from the site.

Note

Some RSS feeds might require you to log in to an account with a user name and password to retrieve the RSS feed.

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