I’ve had the Office 2007 public beta on my laptop since I formatted it, and have been pleasantly surprised with it. It’s actually living up to what Microsoft says it is, a new UI which makes it more productive, with more features designed to help you get the work done.

One of the coolest features of Outlook 2007 is its RSS feed capabilities. RSS support is currently being embraced by Microsoft, who are integrating it into not only Outlook but also into Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista. Now you can view RSS feeds in Outlook alongside your email, which is really very convenient.

However, there is an extra part of Outlook’s RSS support which nobody seems to be talking about much: it’s the ability to download RSS enclosures. What are these? It lets you attach files to an RSS news item. Okay … so, what does that mean to us mortals? It’s how you can download podcasts and vidcasts automatically! Pretty much all the big-name podcast clients (iPodderX, Juice, RSSRadio, etc.) use RSS enclosures to download podcasts. Now with Outlook 2007’s RSS enclosure support, you can get Outlook to download your podcasts for you and store them in your RSS Feeds folder.

Here’s how to get Outlook to download your podcasts for you:
1 – Firstly, you need Outlook 2007 to do this. Outlook 2003 and lower don’t have RSS support. You can get the Office 2007 Beta from here. It’s a 500mb download though, so if you’re on dialup, get your neighbor or neighbourhood clown to download it for you on their DSL/cable connection.

2 – Find your feeds. Usually if you go to your favourite show’s site, they’ll have a little button you can click that goes to the RSS feed. Copy that link, you’ll need it. For the demo, I’m going to use a great video podcast, Ask A Ninja. If you haven’t seen Ask A Ninja, you’re missing out. Anyway, the exact RSS feed I’m using for it is the Windows Media format feed, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja-WMW

3 – Open Outlook 2007.

4 – Right-click on the RSS Feeds folder, and click Add RSS Feed

5 – Enter the URL of the podcast feed:

6 – Click Add. Outlook will ask you if you really want to add the feed. You need to tweak some options on the feed, so click Advanced.

7 – You are presented with the options for the podcast. To make Outlook download the podcasts for you, you need to tick the “Automatically download enclosures for this feed”

8 – Now click OK, and then click Yes. The feed is added, and next time Outlook does a Send/Receive, it will download the RSS feeds and the enclosures. Here is a screenshot of how a podcast appears on Outlook:

Now you just need to double-click on the MP3 / WMV file attached to the message, and you’ll be listening to your podcasts. Note that the Ask A Ninja feed in Windows Media format seems to be a bit delayed to the iPod MP4 feed, so that’s why the latest episode, Thr33, isn’t there.

So is this a great user experience for podcasting? It has a few flaws, but it’s okay. When you have lots of podcasts, you’ll find that a Send/Receive can take a long time as Outlook checks the feeds as well as your email. If you’re someone who has Outlook set to send/receive every 2 minutes, you’ll find that your send/receives will take quite a bit longer. The other thing that is annoying is that you can’t get Outlook to put the podcasts into a folder on the file system, it’s all integrated into your PST file.
Apart from that, it’s pretty nice that it can actually support it. Hopefully in the Beta 2 Tech Refresh (whenever it comes out) they might have improved the user experience a little more.

–Ben

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 12:44 am and is filed under Computing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.