The Future of Syndication in SharePoint

A common requested feature for SharePoint sites is to produce RSS feeds based on the contents of a SharePoint list or document library. Even Scoble asked for it, and it’s still not available! :-) Luckily there is a great SharePoint community that has created some nice solutions.

But it seems that Microsoft itself is looking for a solution too, a few weeks ago I got an email from Tim, an intern at Microsoft, asking for some input concerning RSS in SharePoint. During our conversations Tim explained that they are looking to make feeds as customizable as possible, so users can have multiple “views” on a specific list (even sorting and filtering should be possible). A feed that syndicates multiple lists on a site also has been discussed. Of course Tim could not make any promises but at least it sounds great.

So what’s your idea about syndication in SharePoint? Microsoft is eagerly looking for input, so drop your requests as a comment and I’ll make sure Tim gets them.

6 Comments

  • Narive RSS in sharepoint seems to me to be a truly good idea. Flexibility is key here. Allowing flexible syndication across multiple lists, hopefully across multiple sites, might even help sove the similar content/divergent technology issues of sharepoint vs. Blog vs. Wiki. If I consume sharepoint information across sites via rss, make the ability to consume rss another native sharepoint capability, and make it as powerful and flexible as every other sharepoint list - a rss list, if you will.

  • Hi,



    Could you help hook me up with "Tim"? I have some ideas I would like to discuss with him... I'm addys@DIESPAMMERSDIEmicrosoft.com



    Thanks!









  • I asked for Native RSS support in WSS via the Windows Server Feedback page in February.



    I agree that this should be able to provide feeds based on filtered content (e.g category). The ability to choose either modified or created date should definitley be included.



    Maurice Prather's Synication generator is a good starting point as it requires no external tools and no manual intervention once configured.

  • The comment about syndicating across lists and sites is a good one, but (I know this is a bit out of scope and\or off-topic) this should really be done at a lower level than RSS syndication. If data could be aggregated cross-list and cross-site as first class data sources (think FP data catalogs), then RSS could be generated from it the same way as a list. Aggregation would be incredibly valuable for more than just syndication.

  • I think it would be an excellent idea, but you will need to cover all the standards like RSS and ATOM



    It would also need to be configurable and preserve the security of the portal pages



    Maybe it will appear in the next version?

  • All of my SharePoint sites are NTLM authentication and while I can create the feeds (thanks to Sig Weber, Jan Tielens and DevHawk), aggregating them is more of a challenge. Sure, number of feed readers do support 'basic' authentication, but we don't want to switch to basic. So the ability to syndicate and aggregate through NTLM sites would be a bonus.

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