Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

After announcing the Outlook edition 2.5 upgrade last night, a bunch of things have come to light.  Mostly the fact that we haven’t really laid out what a user needs to do to upgrade.  So let me try to help things out a bit here.

Outlook edition now comes as part of our subscription plans; in particular, it’s part of the business subscription plans.  “Consumer” plans do not include Outlook edition.  But, as part of this release, we’re giving you a way to upgrade (or extend) your account for free.

After you install Outlook edition, it will ask for your NewsGator Online credentials, and it will attempt to activate itself online with your account.  If, at this point, your account is not a business plan, the product will not activate and you’ll get a message to that effect.

So here’s what you need to do.

If you already have a NewsGator Online account:

1. Sign into NewsGator Online, go to the NewsGator Manager, click My Account.

2. Put in your old Outlook edition 2.0 license key where it’s asked for on this page.  That will cause your subscription to be upgraded/extended as appropriate.  If you don’t have your license key handy, you can get it here.

3. Install and activate Outlook edition 2.5.

If you don’t have a NewsGator Online account:

1. Go to https://www.newsgator.com/ngs/order1.aspx, and sign up for a new account.  Make sure to enter your Outlook edition 2.0 license key in the box, if you have one (retrieve it here if you don’t have it handy).

2. After you’ve created your new business account, install and activate Outlook edition 2.5.

Sorry for all the confusion on this…

Wow. It’s been a LONG time in coming. But it’s finally here…NewsGator Outlook edition 2.5.

This release is all about synchronization. But wait, you say…didn’t we have synchronization in 2.0? Well, yes…but there were some limitations. Big ones.

With 2.0, with sync turned on, when you downloaded something into Outlook, it would marked as “read” in NewsGator Online.  Even before you read it in Outlook.  Even if you never read it in Outlook.  The mere act of downloading it marked it as read.  Also, folder hierarchy wasn’t synchronized between Outlook edition 2.0 and NewsGator Online.

This is all changed now.  Read/unread/deleted status of individual items is now synchronized between Outlook edition 2.5 and NewsGator Online (and all other applications using our system – more on that in a bit).  Folder hierarchy is now synchronized between Outlook and Online.  It’s all as it should be.  As someone on the beta said, “it all worked exactly as I expected it to.”  Nice.

How did we do all this?  We’ve developed what we have called our 3rd-generation synchronization API.  NewsGator Online implements this API, and Outlook edition 2.5 uses it for content sync.  The upcoming FeedDemon 1.6 uses this same API for sync.  And we’re opening up and documenting the API for you to use, too.  Watch for more about this in the next couple of days – as soon as we iron out a few things, we’ll publish the docs and sample code, and we’ll tell you about some folks who are already working with it.

[ Incidentally, NewsGator Enterprise Server implements this same API.  Hmm! ]

There were a ton of changes under the covers in this version…but it’s now at a point where it’s integrated tightly with our online platform so we can easily add new features to the product, and we intend to do so quickly.  We have a long list of features we want to add to the product…and I’d love to hear any ideas that you have for it.  It’s been 13 months since we did a release – but I promise it won’t be nearly that long until the next one!

Best of all, this is a free upgrade for existing users.  Here’s the scoop:

Announcement
Upgrade Q&A
Download

Wow, this is cool. And I’m not just saying that because I happen to work here. :-)

As many of you know, FeedDemon has had cool podcasting support since v1.5, with a helper application called FeedStation. FeedStation did the work of downloading podcasts, and adding them to iTunes or Windows Media Player playlists, for syncing to your portable device. Very cool.

Well, we’ve taken FeedStation, modified it a bit, and integrated it with NewsGator Online. You can now find podcasts from within NewsGator web edition, click “Add to Podcasts”, and download them to your iPod (or other portable device) using FeedStation.

And the best part? You don’t have to be anywhere near your iPod. You might have left it at home, in its dock. You’re using NewsGator Online at the office, and you find a few things you want to listen to later. You click the links in web edition, which adds them to the “My Podcasts” folder in NewsGator Online…and FeedStation (which you left running at home) downloads them to your iPod. When you get home from work, they’re sitting there waiting for you.  Woo-hoo!

This will all be integrated with NewsGator Outlook edition in an upcoming release (not the one that’s imminent, the one right after that).

Since a picture is worth 1000 words, and I’m not a very fast typist, let me just show you. :-)

We’re browsing through a feed in NewsGator Web edition, and we see a podcast we want to download.  Just click the “Add to Podcasts” link:

And then you’ll see it show up in your “My Podcasts” folder:

FeedStation is running in the system tray:

…and downloads the selected items.

I don’t have a picture handy of it working with WMP or iTunes, but I promise it does. :-)

Try it out, and let me know what you think!

Update: Nick Bradbury had the same screen-capture-all-over-the-place idea that I did, and posted on his blog about this all as well.

I talked a while back about “Dino” (aka NewsGator Enterprise Server, although that name isn’t yet finalized). If you don’t remember it, here’s a quick blurb from that post:

Dino could be characterized as “NewsGator Enterprise Server”, for lack of a better name. Imagine NewsGator Online, picked up and installed on a server behind a corporate firewall. Imagine it also (optionally) connecting with Active Directory and Exchange server. No longer would a system administrator need to go install NewsGator Outlook edition on 3000 desktops; rather, with Dino, they could install a single server, make some configuration choices, and employees will just get “more stuff” somewhere in their Exchange mailbox without having to install anything on their own machines. Outlook; Outlook Web Access; Blackberry; Exchange ActiveSync; all of this is enabled by the Dino/Exchange integration.
 
Not using Exchange? Not a problem. Dino will have a version of NewsGator Online’s web-based aggregator (also also mobile edition, email edition, and media center edition). Many potential customers have asked us about an intranet-based aggregation solution, and Dino fills the bill for this as well.
 
And with sophisticated indexing capabilities, and integration points with other enterprise systems, Dino can become a central information distribution point for all kinds of content.  All managed in one place, leveraging organizational structure in Active Directory (if available).

Last week, Dino went into beta! This is a huge milestone…my personal congratulations to the team that’s been working on this product.

I gotta tell you, it’s pretty cool. I got the URL of our internal Dino server in an email, clicked on it, and it automatically authenticated me via our AD domain and signed me in.  I found some feeds I wanted (ok, actually I imported my monster-sized OPML file from NewsGator Online), and added a couple of internal feeds I don’t have in our online system.  I could then read my feeds with the Intranet site, just as one would expect.  And then, a couple of clicks later, my feeds started showing up in my Exchange mailbox.  Cool!

RSS in the enterprise has been getting more and more attention in the recent months. Security of internal information is foremost in peoples’ minds…but so is finding ways to efficiently access external information that’s important to the business. And being able to effectively manage this flood of information – centralized feed/subscription management, controlling bandwidth usage, indexing and searching the data you want - is an important piece of the puzzle for small and large companies alike.

We’ve got quite a list of beta customers who have either installed Dino already, or will be soon…including Metropolitan Library System, InfoWorld, CGI Group, and many others that I can’t list at the moment.  Our anticipated v1 ship date is in early Q3.  Things are getting exciting over here!

Yep, I admit it. I’ve gotten sucked into the whole poker craze. I think it was Brad Wilson’s fault, originally.

Only two small problems:

1. I tend to prefer tournaments more than cash games, even though cash games are generally much more profitable.

2. When I get into a new hobby, I really get into it. Not in a gamblaholic sense, but in a “I need to keep doing this so I can get as good as I can possibly be at this thing” sense.

So I of course flew to Vegas last weekend to play in a few tournaments.  Not the WSOP events (although I’m thinking about going back to play in one of the preliminary NLHE tournaments), but just some of the regular tournaments. Here’s a quick story from one of them: