So I made the move to Office 2003 this weekend. It has some really cool new stuff. It is only a beta2 release, but I have always been fine with moving a MS beta2 release into production. Never beta1, I learned my lesson with .NET. There were such significant changes between beta 1 and beta 2 that it broke most of my code. But beta2 is good to go live IMO.

I also decided that since there were such cool improvements in Office (namely support for .NET and the use of managed code inside Office documents) that I'd move to Outlook at the same time. I've never really been a big fan of Outlook, mainly because I spend a lot of time in various newsgroups - so it made sense to stay with Outlook Express. Got mail and news all in the same place. However, I came across a very cool new app. Newsgator. I have to say that Newsgator rocks. I love consuming RSS feeds (I usually use the news plugin for Trillian or SharpReader). <topic track="sidetrack">I find that I don't go to sites that do not aggregate content that often anymore. Consuming an RSS feed let's the news I want come to me - instead of me going looking for it.</topic>

Anyway, back to my point. Oh yeah, Newsgator rocks. You can consume RSS feeds right in Outlook. So, you could have my blog { public virtual blog; } delivered right to Outlook - and you know you want to ;-) . What makes it cool is subscribing to feeds from cool places like the new article feed from CodeProject [RSS] - now I don't even need to go to CodeProject to see what is new because Newsgator notifies me and places it right into Outlook. Or news content from CNET News.com [RSS] - or whatever. It is a great thing. The new version of Newsgator also supports NNTP. So if there are newsgroups you frequent then you could have those delivered to Outlook also. But, I must admit, the NNTP capabilities are lacking. Basically, you get the content delivered to Outlook, but you can reply to the group from there. You can reply to the original author, but that is it. Since I tend to be more involved in newsgroups, and am a big proponent of replying to the group only, then the NNTP functionality left a lot to be desired. Don't get me wrong, it is nice to see what is going on in the group from Outlook - but if I am going to reply I still have to open up Outlook Express and find the post so I can reply to it. I did read on the newsgator site that a plugin was coming for NNTP replies.

The tool still is great. I think my favorite feature is that you can right click on a RSS link in IE and select “Subscribe in Newsgator” to automatically add the feed to Newsgator in Outlook. All in all a great tool - and it is written in .NET. I always jump at the chance to support great software written in .NET (as if you didn't know).