Outlook 2007 and RSS

One of the touted features of Outlook 2007 is its support for RSS. I use Outlook a lot at work, and I read a lot of RSS feeds. So I should be a fan of this feature, right?

Well, no. I only use Outlook for work email. Most of my personal email is on GMail. I don't need no stinkin' client for that, just a web browser. I do have a Yahoo Small Biz account I use occasionally, too. I used to use Thunderbird for it, but I mostly use Yahoo Mail for it these days.

However, my RSS consumption is personal. I don't want to boot up my work email just to read it. So I have not used RSS with Outlook. Until today that is.

Like a lot of folks out there, my company uses Atlassian's Jira and Wiki products. One of the great features they have is an RSS feed builder. I can create a query in Jira and turn it into an RSS feed. I can get RSS feeds for various parts of our Wiki. Then I can subscribe to these feeds in Outlook. It's a perfect use for Outlook's RSS abilities -- subscribing to internal RSS feeds. These feeds aren't available outside of our corporate firewall, but I would only fire up Outlook inside that firewall anyways.

Now anytime a comment is added to a Jira task assigned to me, I get it as an RSS item. Anytime a discussion on the Wiki gets modified (or a new one added), I get it as RSS. It turns out that Outlook's RSS reader is pretty decent, at least so far. Plus my feeds are stored on our Exchange server. I'm not sure if the feed polling is being done by Outlook or Exchange (it would be most cool if Exchange was doing this,) but either way I can access my feeds through Outlook Web Access. Very nice!

Outlook 2007 Breaks Funambol Sync

For some reason, Outlook 2007 breaks Funambol sync. The plugin (which just gives you a little button in Outlook to launch the sync program) won't load. I thought that was OK, I had Funambol set to sync automatically anyways, I didn't need to launch it from Outlook. Unfortunately, that stopped working too. It seemed to read all the events from my calendar in Outlook, but then would fail when sync'ing to ScheduleWorld (which in turn sync'ed to my Google Calendar.) Maybe the data coming from Outlook was causing a problem, who knows. I updated my Funambol plugin, but to no avail.

Outlook 2007 does allow export to a "Office Online" calendar. That works very nicely. There is even an iCal for the calendar. I tried to then add that calendar to Google Calendar, using it's iCal, but it did not work. Google Calendar would accept it at first, then a little while later would complain about not being able to open some URL.

So my wonderful utopia of having auto-sync of my work calendar to Google Calendar so that it was easily viewable by me or my wife is over for now. With Outlook 2007 I can subscribe to my own calendar, which works great. I can't subscribe to my wife's, probably because of security. At least I can see upcoming personal appointments on my Outlook calendar at work.

Office 2007

I went to a Microsoft Vista/Office launch event last week. I really wanted to hear about XAML support in Vista/Office. I got to hear a little about it, and see some very cool demos of applications that were built using XAML, but it was all in all short on XAML details. Oh well.

As part of the event, I scored a free retail copy of Office 2007 and Groove. I haven't bothered with Groove, but I went ahead and installed Office 2007 on my laptop. I use Outlook all day at work, and now I have this staring at me:

Notice the "Click here to enable Instant Search". That's not just for the inbox...

Pervasive indeed. Of course the "instant search" being referenced here is Microsoft's Desktop Search. I've played with this in the past, but I liked Google's a lot better. Mostly because it handled Firefox and Thunderbird well, but MS's did not. I now also use Google's Desktop sidebar, and I have some gadgets for things like my calendar, iTunes controller, and some RSS feeds.

So I entertained the idea of switching to the MS version of these things. I realized that the vast majority of desktop searches I do are for Outlook emails. So the MS search probably does that as well as the Google one. Most other searches I do are in code using Eclipse. I did occasionally use GDS to search through legacy code back when I worked with lots of legacy code... Also, I thought if nothing else, perhaps it would use less resources (even though Google Desktop is actually pretty darn efficient.) First problem with this idea is that MS does not offer a sidebar for Windows XP. On Vista they have one, but I've heard nothing about them porting it to Windows XP. Perhaps it is dependent on Aero, who knows.

So I thought, well what about Yahoo's Widget Engine + Microsoft's Desktop Search? Maybe that would be a comparable combination. So I tried out YWE, and found widgets that did all the things that my Google ones were doing. They had a much larger memory footprint on my system, around 2-to-1. They also took up more real estate. I only use the Google sidebar at work, where I have a dual monitor setup, so I am very sensitive about desktop real estate.

Anyways, I was unsatisfied with Yahoo's widgets, so I did not even give MS's search a try. Guess I will have to live with the MS Advert. Or maybe there's some option for turning it off.

One other interesting thing about Outlook 2007. It somehow imported all my RSS feeds. I really don't understand how this happened. I suddenly had a huge RSS folder with all my Google Reader feeds, plus a few random ones from Microsoft. My Google Desktop email widget was then overwhelmed with all these RSS files that it thought were emails received via Outlook. I have no interest in a desktop based RSS reader, as I am quite happy with Google Reader. So I deleted all the RSS that Outlook had created and downloaded. I just wish I knew how it did this. Maybe it detected it from Google Reader, who knows.

Update: One more Office 2007 issue. When I loaded Word 2007, I noticed that my PDF maker buttons were gone. These get installed when you install Adobe Acrobat. I did some searching and supposedly they should be in the "Add-Ins" tab of the ribbon. But I had no Add-Ins tab. Just for kicks, I opened up Acrobat and tried to create a new PDF from a Word document. It crashed Acrobat. I went back to Word 2007, and simply printed my document to the PDF Printer that Acrobat creates. That worked great. I also downloaded Microsoft's PDF maker that is an add-on to Office 2007. It also allowed me to easily create a PDF. So I have no problems creating PDFs, which is good since that is how I like to share documentation at work. Still, I'd like my buttons back. Maybe re-install Acrobat? That's a pain, since I have to re-activate it as well...