RSS Ubiquity

A while back, there were 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.