Office 12 Beta 2

The quick run down:
The interface is great. You get more space and things are clearer. Particular things I like are the Contacts cards, the To Do Bar, the vertical tasks and next appts section (vertical means less room taken up) and mostly RSS feeds in Outlook.

Seeing that reminded me of a conversation I had with someone recently who lost her entire RSS feeds in Outlook. Rather than suggest restoring from backup and getting the evil look, I wondered about how to do it. Of course you can't use regedit for an RSS feed in your Exchange mailbox. You can't import your RSS feed from XML so my RSS Reader (rssreader.com) I thought was useless. Or is it?

A quick export of the RSS feed from Outlook 2007 as an OPML file (File, Export) shows a fairly simple XML file. A few quick Find and Replace settings in Word to change title to "outline text=" and link to "xmlUrl" and so on would have done it but the syndicator in Outlook picks up all the info you need from the rss or atom feed. It was faster to copy and paste them from the XML document.

Job done, Outlook looks great, RSS feed pulls the whole lot rather than just headers (though I'd prefer the lot in the post rather than the first part of the blog and the whole thing in an HTML file) and it is backwardly compatible so activesync on my PDA can update my mailbox after Outlook gets the feed up to date and I can read my preferred blogs in Outlook offline on the train. Just need to get some decent blog sites now :-)