Customising Outlook 2007 to be a better RSS Reader

Owen recently blogged about how he doesn't really like Outlook 2007 as a RSS Reader. I interpreted the gist of this post, with which I mostly agreed, as the difference between a Domain Specific tool (such as SharpReader) versus a generic tool such as Outlook. I do use Outlook 2007 now on Vista as my main RSS reader for the following reasons that work for me:

• Flagging and marking of posts so I can manage important posts just like emails in task lists etc.
• Integrated desktop/Vista search so I can find posts and emails alike
• Ctrl+F to just forward the whole post to a colleague who would be interested in the post
• Outlook Web Access - although it won't actively refresh the feed from the server, I can still read my posts remotely
• Synchronise to my Windows Mobile 5 PDA phone - it is just an outlook folder
• Exchange Server - the posts are stored on the server, so they go with me
• ... Outlook is a powerful customisable tool so I expect to be able to use RSS data in increasingly useful ways

Owen has two main complaints though:

• Not being able to mark all the items as read without going to each folder and right clicking
• Not being able to see all the latest posts without looking for all the emboldened RSS feed folders

I agreed, but I thought I'd have a quick go at cracking this. The easiest way I could see was to create a new search folder in Outlook that equated to the following queries:

• "all posts that are unread" - I can then select all items and click "mark as read" to do a global catchup.
• "all posts from the last week that are unread" - I can then just see recent unread posts

This has me thinking that in fact with all the rules and clever customisation you can do with Outlook you could really integrate RSS data into a full on knowledge worker workflow.

Below I show how I created the Search Folder showing RSS posts for the last seven days:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4: