Newsfeeds

By Scott Schnoll
19 Apr 2004 | SearchExchange.com

Digg This!

StumbleUpon

Del.icio.us

The following are Exchange resources from "25 Exchange 2003 Tips in 25 minutes." This content is excerpted from Scott Schnoll's book, "Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled," brought to you by © (2004) Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Addison-Wesley Professional. Return to the main page for more tips on this topic.

A newsfeed is a Web site, newsgroup, or blog that is available via a feed mechanism (i.e., a mechanism that "feeds" the content to a newsfeed client). One of more popular types of newsfeeds is RSS, which stands for different things depending on whom you ask. RSS can mean Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, and Really Simple Syndication. RSS was first developed by Netscape in 1999 as a way to implement channels in its Web browser. Channels didn't last long, and Netscape abandoned RSS development. Others such as UserLand persisted, and now RSS is one of the most successful Internet-based implementations of XML to date.

Today there are a variety of both RSS creation programs and news aggregators, which are RSS clients that often provide access to newsgroups in addition to newsfeeds. Because RSS is designed for content that is updated often or continuously, static Web sites typically don't use it. However, RSS is gaining in popularity, in part due to the benefits it provides folks who do update their sites regularly, including bloggers. In fact, you'll find that many blogs are available through RSS feeds, enabling you to view all of your news and information in a single client instead of separate Web pages.

If you search the Web, you can find several RSS newsreaders, some of which are free, some shareware, and others commercial applications. They generally all work the same way.

You install the RSS client.
You subscribe to RSS feeds.
The RSS client checks your subscribed feeds periodically (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, and so on).
Updated content is displayed using headlines.
You click the headline for the content you want to read.

RSS is a great way to have the news come to you for perusal and reading. If you have not yet experimented with RSS, I recommend that you do so; you should expect RSS feeds to continue to grow in popularity, and as mentioned previously, Exchange 2003 content is already available via RSS.

Get more "25 Exchange 2003 Tips in 25 minutes." Return to the main page.

About the author: Scott Schnoll, an Expert on SearchExchange.com, is an MCT, MCSA and a long-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

In addition to writing "Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled," he is a co-author of the upcoming "Exchange 2003 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press" and lead author for "Exchange 2000 Server: The Complete Reference."

Scott has written numerous articles for Exchange & Outlook Magazine, and is a regular speaker at Microsoft conferences, including MEC and TechEd, as well as industry conferences such as Comdex and MCP TechMentor, where he covers topics such as Exchange, clustering, Internet Information Services and security.

Digg This! StumbleUpon Del.icio.us