Outlook 12 is really quite nice and this will no doubt be the first of many missives on the subject as it is central to our success at Attensa. I saw an in-depth demo and spoke with some Microsoft folks at Syndicate in SF a few weeks ago. At Attensa we could not be more thrilled as Outlook 12 will bring RSS awareness to the masses. And yes, we think that this is a good thing. A great thing. P.S. The calendar features and revamped user interface is really nice in look, feel, and capabilities. I can't wait!
I posted the following paragraph as a comment on Marc Orchant's blog on the subject. He has some strong opinions, and lots of links to related stories so check it out.
There is a lot of room before during and after Outlook 12. I can't speak for the others, but at Attensa, we are eagerly anticipating the pervasive use of Outlook 12 for our business model to hockey stick. We are focused on massively scaleable, realtime application of attention data to improve the RSS user experience. Further, we intend to make available a faceless app that contains our engine to make Outlook 12 that much better on its own and when connected to our servers - whether behind the firewall for businesses and for anyone on our own servers. Basic RSS readers will no doubt be commoditized, and we agree ISVs will need to innovate not just deliver the obvious.
Further...
Ourt first implementation of AttentionStream technology has been applied to synchonization. It is our assessment that the slow, manual, subscription level, user expereience associated with sync solutions of today are not sufficient for power users or business. Attensa's AttentionStreams deliver a rich, instantaneous, and automatic capability between Outlook, Web, and Mobile (more later) that is unrivaled by ISVs and will be compatible with the MSFT sync engine (though it's solution is only subscription level.) Lastly we will expose our APIs for 3rd parties soon and a subset of these APIs will be compatible with the NG API. At least that is the plan for now. If synchonization is important to Marc, he should love what we're up to because we don't think the state of the art is too swift.
The Microsoft Program Manager has a new blog and posted on Outlook 12 as it relates to RSS that is worth looking over. The MSFT Outlook feature set is a god send and we can't wait to take advantage of the sea change coming in 2007 when "the enterprise" STARTS deploying to SOME of their users. But more on that another time.