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RSS in Outlook - upgrading from Beta 2 to B2TR

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With the Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh now live on the web, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the best way to get your RSS feeds up and running after you upgrade. The B2TR installation is actually a patch that installs on top of the original Beta 2 and makes upgrading very simple.

In B2TR we made a significant amount of changes to the way that are RSS Feeds are stored internally inside of Outlook. These changes were made to deal with several cases where users could receive duplicate items for an individual post, have duplicate feed folders, or even experience the loss of feeds or sync breaking when using an Exchange account.

If you've got a lot of feeds in the original Beta 2 and are going to be installing the B2TR patch, we recommend a few steps to get your RSS setup using the new architecture.

Upgrade Steps

  1. In Beta2, export your feeds as an OPML file.

  2. Patch to the B2TR.

  3. Run Outlook with the /cleansharing command. Do this by going to Start: Run, then type "Outlook /cleansharing".

    1. This will remove ALL of the RSS Feed subscriptions from Outlook.
    2. It will not remove the folders or the data, but if you go to the Account Manager's RSS tab (Tools: Accounts, RSS) you will not see any more feeds listed.
    3. This is an important step since it clears out all the feeds using the old architecture.
    4. Note: this will also remove all of the subscriptions to Microsoft SharePoint sites and Internet Calendar subscriptions.

  4. You can now delete the folders for your old RSS Feeds since the next step will create new folders.

    1. If you're on Exchange give this operation a few minutes to sync to your server and other Outlook clients.

  5. Import your OPML file.

Those steps should get you working cleanly with the improved RSS architecture in the B2TR. If you've got any comments or issues please use your normal support channel (if you're a corporate beta user) or drop me a comment below.

Internet Explorer 7 Integration

Outlook B2TR's integration with the IE 7 RSS Platform will require the IE7 RC1 build for WindowsXP, or Windows Vista RC1, in order for the sync to work correctly.

Thanks! Good luck with the B2TR build.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2006
    PingBack from http://www.mstechtoday.com/2006/09/18/upgrading-your-feeds-to-outlook-2007-beta-2-tr/
  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2006
    PingBack from http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/09/16/43
  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2006
    My OPML file contains a nice hierachy for my feeds.
    When I import this into IE 7 RC1 the hierarchy is maintained.

    However in Outlook 2007 B2TR when it then picks up the feed list from the common feed store in IE 7 RC1 the folder hierarchy is ignored and all the feeds are just listed in alphabetical order.

    Is this going to change?
    I prefer the feed reading views available to me in Outlook (not least because I sync whether I've read a feed or not between multiple PCs)   but not having a folder hierarchy is a real pain.

    I guess I can manually create folders in Outlook but will this be remembered in my exports and imports?
  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2006
    At present all feeds have the 'Messages' view by default.
    It would be so much better if all RSS feeds were set to a new view called 'RSS Feed' view by default.

    That way I would be able to simply define the 'RSS Feed' view the way I like it, and then all my feeds would have this view.

    At present, the easiest way to do this is, is 'hi-jack' an existing defined view that I don't use like 'Last seven days'.    I alter this and then manually apply it to each feed after I've imported it.
  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2006
    I was directed to this post in response to a bug I filed regarding Outlook culling my feed list from approx 200 to just the last 21 in the list.

    So, I followed your steps, cleared out numerous folders and re-imported my OPML only for this to happen again - repeatedly.

    The bug has unfortunately been closed as not reproducible so I just wonder if it is just something in my test environment that is causing this (B2TR on XPSP2 connecting to Exchange 2003 SP2 on W2k3Server ent. - single server set up so is DC and GC as well).

    After importing a lot of feeds and restarting Outlook it also takes a long time to settle down - for example going to Tools - Account Settings warns that Outlook is still searching for shared folders for some considerable time after opening Outlook. The server only has 2 mailboxes (only one of which is used with any regularity) so I can't see it being a resource issue.
  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2006
    Just as a side note:

    the same cut off of feeds happens if I import the opml in to IE and then sync Outlook with the shared feed list.
  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2006
    Known issues?http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/4586/dialogboxaz7.jpg ; http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/5673/dialogbox2my2.jpg
  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2006
    MY RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 B2TR are empty. They are working ok in IE7 (final). What could it be?