Not a new product, really… just a new way of using it.
First off, I’m still using Newsgator with Outlook. And for now I’ve kept my normal Newsgator subscriptions and folders on my desktop… but I’ll likely get rid of most of them soon. I already have on my laptop, except for some of the super high traffic ones like blogs.msdn.com.
So how am I getting the rest of my feeds? By using Newsgator E-mail Edition. How does it work? Newsgator makes all of my RSS subscriptions available on a POP3 server. So I have Outlook set up to check every 5-10 minutes for new items. What does it do when it finds them? Why… it puts them in a folder on my MSN/Hotmail account using the Outlook Connector for MSN.
So now when I go online with my laptop, I don’t have to tell Newsgator to download items. And I don’t have to deal with seeing “new” items that I’ve already read, since Hotmail keeps track of what I’ve read and what I haven’t. And, of course, I can access it from anywhere.
What’s more, my PPC-6601 (my Pocket PC/smartphone) connects every hour during the workday to my home computer over a VPN connection, and Activesyncs. So all my new messages are downloaded directly to my Pocket PC. Activesync removes the messages after a few days so they don’t waste space on my device. On my desktop, Outlook autoarchives my Hotmail RSS folder in much the same way, moving posts older than 5 days or so to an offline folder.
I may look into keeping posts online longer. For now, I’m using one of my “secondary” MSN accounts which only gets 250MB of space. I’d like to switch my primary (2GB) account from one I no longer use to this one, but I haven’t found an easy way to do so yet, and there hasn’t been any urgent enough need for me to actually figure it out. Still, 250MB should hold a lot of posts.
It would be nice if both my desktop and laptop could have complete archives… which greatly enriches my offline information-retrieval capability. So that’s another idea I may look into.
For now I’m going to see how this new set up serves me this week. I’ll be sure to let you know how it works out.