Outlook, RSS, and the corporate environment
Lot's of folks have been using the B1TR of Outlook 12 in corporate environments, and have asked what kind of interactions we'll have between RSS and their systems.
By default, Outlook 12 delivers new RSS subscriptions to sub-folders underneath the "RSS Feeds" root folder. This folder lives in your default store for each profile, which means if you're connected to an Exchange server they will be delivered there and it will count against your quota for size and item count. This default behavior gives us several things for free:
- automatic roaming of the RSS subscriptions across any connected Outlook 12 client
- item-level roaming across the same O12 clients, any mobile devices, and OWA
For some corporate environements this is a completely acceptable default setup, since they have large or no quotas or no retention policies. For Exchange environments where an admin would like more control over their users RSS experience and its impact on storage and privacy, the following types of settings can be deployed:
1.
2. Basic functionality: Admins, if they desire, can completely turn off RSS functionality in Outlook 12.
Delivery Location: Admins can easily deploy the setting so that RSS feeds must be delivered to a PST and not the Exchange store. This can eliminate concerns that RSS will severly impact the storage quotas of your users' mailboxes.
Feeds: Admins can now also deploy a set of RSS feeds to users. You can imagine an admin wanting all of their users to have the company's eNewsletter feed and deploying it to the desktop. When deploying feeds, an admin can also control most of the properties for that subscription, including the ability of the user to delete that feed from Outlook.
AutoArchive: At the client level, since RSS in Outlook is just like mail, you can apply and/or deploy custom AutoArchive settings to RSS feed folders. In my case, I've setup AA rules on my RSS feed folders so that items older than 7 days get deleted automatically.