You're right about the Outlook experience being vastly different on a standalone as opposed to a being on a corporate exchange system. Outlook is quite simply a different program when it's networked like that, more of a data management system than anything else.
I think it all gets more interesting when we take the concept of subscriptions and aggregation beyond RSS. What about subscribing to an events calender (stored in some XML Format) for an organization and have that feed into your personal calendar? How about subscribing to a contact list, aggregated into the contacts folder? Tasks? The list could go on. Outlook is an Information Manager, not an Email program and having additional sources of information such as RSS is great.
With that said, I still use SharpReader (not Outlook) to read RSS. When the data sources go beyond just RSS, I'll go through the effort and/or cost of reading feeds in Outlook.
A plus for using Outlook for blogging is that you can do some really neat things with the built in VBA support. For example:
http://robertlevy.net/
2003_06_08...549303548534859
The problem with Outlook is it stores its data in a proprietary format, officially known only to Microsoft. It only exports to Outlook Express, which is also a proprietary format.
- adam
Adam - I don't think all export options are installed by default, but export in my Outlook installation lists export choices like CSV, Access, Excell, ...
I tried NewsGator and I liked it a lot, I, too, use Outlook continuously all day long. I'm back to using SharpReader because I like viewing blogs "native", as websites. The SharpReader experience is more like blogsurfing, and less like some text-extract.
Ole
Ole, have you tried RSS Bandit? Wait til you see FeedDemon. I should do a review of all those.
I think "Outlook" and I immediately think "Virus" and "scripts" etc.
I run an EMail client called The Bat! It works very well and runs absolutely NO virii or scripts. It has an embedded HTML viewer that isn't Internet Explorer.
Pete
bout time you looked at NewsGator. BTW, speaking of signal to noise and spam ... watch out now.. infoworld is running ads in their feeds. NewsGator is the first ad to run: http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/webl...e.aspx?
post=607
>I think "Outlook" and I immediately
>think "Virus" and "scripts" etc.
Did you know that the latest Outlook is almost impossible to run a virus in? The only way I'd get it is if I unzipped an attachment with a virus inside of it, and then ran the attachment. Plus, any decent corporation will do virus blocking on their servers. Plus, any decent system now will have an antivirus program running on it. Plus Outlook 2003 has a smaller attackable surface (read: fewer APIs). Add all these together and you should check Outlook out again.
>http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?
post=607
Tim, yeah, I see that. It's not a good trend. RSS was designed to be an ad for your site! So, to make that into an ad too is counter to its purpose.
Jeff, you wrote "I don't think all export options are installed by default, but export in my Outlook installation lists export choices like CSV, Access, Excell".
Those formats are all useless. They only store text, no attachments, not even in the date of the email.
So I am trying to do something about this:
http://www.odfi.org/
- adam
Thanks for the link to Find.
Outlook search times bothers me to no end because it should not take 30 minutes to search for something in Outlook while it takes 0.02 seconds to do the same search on the web.
Hopefully this search problem gets fixed in the next release of Outlook because, really, it should be easier to search 100,000 emails than to search 3 billion webpages.
Adam -
I don't see why this matters with regard to newsgator for RSS.
If your complaint is with outlook in general, then yes this wouldn't get you attachments (but outlook does have an object model that would allow you to get attachments programmatically, it'd just be more work to code something up to export data including them than simply clicking export.)
Jeff, you're assuming I'm on a machine that can run Outlook, and that I can write code.
In fact those are both true, but beside the point.
What if I back my Outlook files up to a CD, then restore them to a different machine? What if I can't get my copy of Outlook to run for some obscure reason? What if it's 20 years from now and Outlook and Windows don't exist?
That's why you need open data formats.
- adam
Adam,
Don't get me wrong, I understand your reasons. I'd just argue that what ifs like that extends far further. What if 20 years from now you don't have a working drive capable of reading a CD ROM?
My argument is merely this, if this is really a critical feature that people *will* pay money for, Outlook's object model is open enough that someone could easily write an outlook-export/outlook-backup tool that would do this.
That such a tool isn't out there, or at least isn't well known would indicate to me that this isn't very important to very many people who use Outlook.
You could argue that the lack of this is a major adoption blocker for Outlook, and the users who would care don't use Outlook because of this (thus making the market for a 3rd-party tool doing this small.) If you want to make that argument, then I'd point out that Microsoft is in business of selling software. If supporting an open data format would win a large number of customers, it is quite likely that Microsoft would look at adding support in some form.
>>
Tim, yeah, I see that. It's not a good trend. RSS was designed to be an ad for your site! So, to make that into an ad too is counter to its purpose.
Jeff: Yes, but people understand the need to migrate data from computer to computer and from storage medium to storage medium. When you buy a computer you (probably) back up your data files and move them to the new one. If you are serious about backup, you ensure that you can read whatever media you back up to.
People are much less aware of the fact that much of this data also needs a certain runtime environment to be accessible.
So it's not a real issue for Outlook adoption because people don't think about it. And in particular *governments*, storing my data with my tax dollars, don't think about it. Raising awareness of this is one of the reasons I started ODFI.
- adam
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