RSS Aggregation - Part 1: The Partnership

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is meant to provide users with an easy way to monitor multiple sources of news, blogs, and other content which has headline-style delimitations and is updated frequently.  It is an open, publicly-defined and developed format based on standard XML and hosted by the publishers’ web servers.  A user ‘subscribes’ to an RSS ‘feed’ using an application with RSS aggregation capabilities.

RSS Aggregation in Outlook is aimed at providing the user with a consistent look, feel, and experience while interacting with RSS feeds and related information.  While RSS can be a complex technology to interact with, Outlook will merge the complexities and cover it with our friendly user interface.  From the beginning of interacting with a feed using the subscription process through managing your feeds, their associated folder hierarchies, and potentially sharing feeds with others, Outlook will cover RSS in those situations from end-to-end.

Interacting with RSS feeds will be extremely similar to managing your mail items now.  Since we will have RSS live within the mail module we will keep the standard look and feel of folders, hierarchies, and the drag-and-drop support that users have come to depend and rely on.  RSS items will be a derivation of the IPM.post message class, so compliance with ZOOM and our related core technologies will be easy to implement.  Roaming support will enable Exchange users to have their feed items follow them from machine to machine, keeping their RSS items with them at all times.