Using RSS Feeds in Microsoft Outlook 2010

• Understanding RSS 409

• Configuring RSS 410

• Adding RSS Feeds to Outlook 410

• Using Your RSS Feeds 413

• Adding an OPML File to Outlook 415

• Managing Your RSS Feeds 417

• Setting RSS Properties 419

• Creating Rules for RSS Feeds 421

MICROSOFT Outlook 2010, like Outlook 2007 before it, supports Really Simple Syndication (RSS)—a feature that gives the ability to integrate external information provided by content publishers (such as news websites) into a folder in Outlook 2010. The information is transmitted in a particular Extensible Markup Language (XML) format (described as an RSS feed). To use this information, you configure Outlook 2010 to subscribe to the RSS feeds that provide the stories or information that you want. These stories (or other RSS-provided information) are stored in a feed-specific folder under the RSS Feeds folder in Outlook 2010.

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 Windows 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. Using such a feed in Outlook 2010 is easy, because you simply paste in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to the RSS feed that you want to retrieve, and Outlook 2010 takes care of the rest.

RSS is also referred to as web content syndication, where users subscribe to the content that they want from news sites (and other websites providing dynamic information). In this case, a subscription is not like signing up for a newsletter, where you have to provide an email 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 2010) to connect to that URL. The RSS reader will retrieve the information (news articles, or other dynamic content) automatically from the site.