RSS Functionality in Outlook

Michael Affronti highlights some of the RSS features available in Outlook. Specifically the functionality of managing RSS feeds that are updated. If you’re like me and trying to manage hundreds of RSS feeds, keeping tabs on the ones your interested in, and maybe in the middle of reading while eliminating the ones you’re not interested in can become a full time job.

Here’s how Outlook 2007 is proposed to handle the situation:

A blogger writes five posts; A, B, C, D, E.
Outlook user downloads A, B, C, D, E.

Outlook user deletes a few posts and is left with A, C, D.

The blogger updates the content of B, C. For simplicity call them B1, C1. He also writes post F.

Outlook downloads the XML and sees the changes.

Outlook ignores the updates of the posts the user has explicitly deleted and updates the content of the ones that still exist automatically, leaving the user with posts A, C1, D, F.

This makes perfect sense to me. I currently use Bloglines for my RSS reader and have all my subscriptions checked to ignore updates. Updates to a post just annoy me, mainly because the update isn’t clearly identified, so you end up re-reading the entire post looking for the change. Maybe you’re lucky and able to find it, for me it’s not worth it, so I ignore them.

All of this still doesn’t change my #1 priority for an RSS management tool. I’ve got to be able to check my subscriptions from multiple locations on multiple machines and never worry about missing an article or having to read the same article multiple times.