It is here! U2U RSS Feeds for SharePoint
Maybe you’ve noticed that the last couple of weeks I haven’t blogged a lot. Behind the scenes the U2U SharePoint Team was working hard on finishing the first release of a very exiting new tool: U2U RSS Feeds for Microsoft SharePoint 2003! The people that have visited that Belgian Developer & IT-Pro Days two weeks ago, already got a sneak preview. But now it’s ready to be shown to the rest of the blogosphere!
If you can’t wait, go check it out at http://www.u2u.net/software.aspx . If you want to see how it looks like, watch this short video, starring me! :-) Any questions, remarks, issues, features request, … can be posted on our brand new SharePoint Resource Center.
So, what is it? The tool has only one goal: expose information in SharePoint as RSS Feeds. Nothing new you may think, there are several other solutions for this, so what’s the buzz? I think our approach is unique in quite a few domains:
- Aggregation of items stored in multiple lists on multiple
sites
You can create an RSS feed that contains information coming from more than one lists (or document libraries), that are potentially on different sites. - Customizable layout of RSS items
For each list that you aggregate in an RSS Feed you can specify how the items in the RSS feed should look like. You can do that by using some sort of formulas, referring to fields coming from the SharePoint lists. - Non-intrusive installation
The installation of the RSS Feeds tool doesn’t change a thing about your SharePoint installation, the IT-Pro guys will be happy! The tool is completely separated from the SharePoint sites and doesn’t require you to add metadata or web parts to SharePoint. - SharePoint Authorization
Are you afraid of exposing sensitive data? Well you don’t have to, our tool uses the SharePoint security model, so if a user doesn’t have access to the SharePoint list he or she can’t retrieve information from the RSS feed. Anonymous access to RSS feeds is also supported (if your SharePoint site is available for anonymous users of course). - GUI Administration
The administration of the tool (creating feeds, item layouts, …) is completely done by using a nice graphical user interface.