RSS in Outlook - upgrading from Beta 2 to B2TR

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With the Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh now live on the web, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the best way to get your RSS feeds up and running after you upgrade. The B2TR installation is actually a patch that installs on top of the original Beta 2 and makes upgrading very simple.

In B2TR we made a significant amount of changes to the way that are RSS Feeds are stored internally inside of Outlook. These changes were made to deal with several cases where users could receive duplicate items for an individual post, have duplicate feed folders, or even experience the loss of feeds or sync breaking when using an Exchange account.

If you've got a lot of feeds in the original Beta 2 and are going to be installing the B2TR patch, we recommend a few steps to get your RSS setup using the new architecture.

Upgrade Steps

  1. In Beta2, export your feeds as an OPML file.

  2. Patch to the B2TR.

  3. Run Outlook with the /cleansharing command. Do this by going to Start: Run, then type "Outlook /cleansharing".

    1. This will remove ALL of the RSS Feed subscriptions from Outlook.
    2. It will not remove the folders or the data, but if you go to the Account Manager's RSS tab (Tools: Accounts, RSS) you will not see any more feeds listed.
    3. This is an important step since it clears out all the feeds using the old architecture.
    4. Note: this will also remove all of the subscriptions to Microsoft SharePoint sites and Internet Calendar subscriptions.

  4. You can now delete the folders for your old RSS Feeds since the next step will create new folders.

    1. If you're on Exchange give this operation a few minutes to sync to your server and other Outlook clients.

  5. Import your OPML file.

Those steps should get you working cleanly with the improved RSS architecture in the B2TR. If you've got any comments or issues please use your normal support channel (if you're a corporate beta user) or drop me a comment below.

Internet Explorer 7 Integration

Outlook B2TR's integration with the IE 7 RSS Platform will require the IE7 RC1 build for WindowsXP, or Windows Vista RC1, in order for the sync to work correctly.

Thanks! Good luck with the B2TR build.