The Bottom Line
- NewsGator Inbox for Outlook integrates with Outlook very well
- You can search, organize and archive RSS feeds and Usenet like email with NewsGator
- NewsGator works with NewsGator Online Services for advanced subscription synchronization
- NewsGator Inbox for Outlook only works with Outlook
- NewsGator lacks easy grouping and group-editing of RSS feeds
- You cannot set up per-folder or per-group news pages in NewsGator
Description
- NewsGator aggregates RSS/RDF/Atom news feeds as well as Usenet newsgroups in Outlook.
- Lets you browse news on the summary page or access individual items like emails in folders.
- NewsGator displays related links for news items, item display can be customized using style sheets.
- With NewsGator, you can use all of Outlook's editing, search and organization tools for news items.
- Adds a "Subscribe in NewsGator" item to Internet Explorer menu and supports feed: URLs.
- NewsGator supports custom RSS extensions and feed enclosures for rich applications.
- A wizard that lets you search feeds by keyword and includes a directory makes subscribing easy.
- NewsGator defuses potentially dangerous HTML and scripting elements in feeds.
- Using plug-ins, you can post to a blog (Blogger, Radio UserLand, and more) directly from NewsGator.
- NewsGator supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/3/XP and Outlook 2000/2.
Guide Review - NewsGator Inbox for Outlook 2.6
You get the power of a mature email program (Outlook in this case) for searching, organizing and archiving news. The email client gets to display clean newsfeeds that are spam-free (unfortunately, that's not true for Usenet news, which NewsGator integrates as well).
NewsGator also provides a summary page that gives a concise overview of unread news. Unfortunately, you can't group your subscriptions and create such useful news pages per group.
NewsGator lets you do another very smart thing with your subscriptions, though: integrating with NewsGator Online Services, NewsGator can automatically synchronize your feeds and individual news items between different installations, a web-based interface, an RSS-to-POP gateway and a mobile edition.
Since NewsGator news are essentially emails, it's easy to forward them or reply via email, and with the right plug-in, you can post to a blog directly from NewsGator, too. And using NewsGator's custom RSS extensions it can get even better: you can include arbitrary data with a feed and have NewsGator process it using .NET and Outlook integration.
If only all email clients (and better ones than Outlook) could do all this...
