Whilst the next version of Outlook won’t be out until the second half of 2006 – we’re having ‘fun’ trying out the latest version in its beta format. That’s if you include software crashes, lost documents and hunting for features in your definition of ‘fun’.
One thing we did like is the fact that Outlook 12 supports not only RSS feeds but also podcasts. That’s no big leap since podcasting is an offshoot of RSS technology but it was still nice to see it was made possible in the first attempts at RSS in Outlook itself.
Since there’s little or no documentation to accompany the Office 12 technical beta, here’s how to do it.
To setup any RSS feed go to Tools | Email Accounts | RSS subscriptions then click New. Paste in the RSS feed link from the web site. Click OK and Outlook 12 will grab details from the web site and confirm the validity of the RSS feed (we found that some RSS feeds were not accepted, and we’re not sure if that’s a bug in the beta software or the supplying web site).
On the next dialog box are some options that you can use to support podcasting and also grab web pages for reading offline.
Under ‘Downloads’ choose both options. ‘Automatically download Enclosures for this subscription’ and ‘Download full article as an .html attachment to each item.
The ‘Change folder’ button lets you choose an alternative destination to save than the default ‘RSS subscriptions’ folder. You could have a separate Outlook folder and sub-folders for podcasts.
Sadly the feature doesn’t go far enough and there’s probably an opportunity for a developer to make a utility to enhance this feature. A good enhancement would be to save podcasts to a file folder instead of saving in the Outlook data file and especially saving those files to a PDA for playing on the move. The podcasting support for the Pocket PC is primitive at best and shows up some long standing omissions to ActiveSync (eg the rudimentary support for sync’ing a desktop folder to a PDA).
