Although using a separate RSS feed aggregator has suited me well for home use for some time now (I use Bloglines) when I’ve tried to sell the concept of RSS to work colleagues I’ve met resistance along the lines of “not another application to install and learn!”. Also, in a corporate environment where downloads and personal installs are disallowed, it’s not a good idea to promote rule breaking.

There are occasions when I would like to check feeds while at work however, so for a while now I’ve been looking for a solution that integrates seamlessly into the ’standard corporate desktop’ we all use, in the hope that we may persuade the guardians of our infrastructure that RSS is a useful tool we should be using rather than the ’spawn of the devil’ that many of them believe it to be.

This week I’ve been investigating RSS Popper, an RSS reader that integrates very neatly with Microsoft Outlook. It is a small freeware application, still in development but stable, that seems to work extremely well in my tests so far. It can be set up to use a corporate firewall, via an HTTP proxy, and so is subject to the usual security measures that protect our network.
Because it sits right there in the e-mail client many of us use, you can choose to read the feeds if you want when you check mail - no additional application to open and manage.

You can also tune it to your needs through an easy to use interface (accessible from the Outlook toolbar) and it places all its retrieved items neatly in a folder of your choice, separate from your main e-mail Inbox area if you wish. It supports multiple feeds from the same source (such as Gmail accounts) and - if you are an IE user - right-clicking on a feed button on a web page allows you to subscribe directly to the feed in RSS Popper via an added menu item.

I will probably keep using Bloglines because I’ve a whole host of feeds in there, but the key ones - like Visual Being - I’ll be checking in Outlook as well.

Posted by Roy Hammans in Software, Tools