RSS Feeds

Today, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is used to distribute updates from news sites, blogs, and other regularly updated sources. Internet Explorer 7 and later versions include a new Feed Discovery feature that integrates feed display into the Web browser. With RSS, users can easily keep track of updates to many different Web sites, including intranet sites.

If you have internal blogs or news sites that publish an RSS feed, you can add them to Internet Explorer on the computers in your organization. The easiest way to configure custom feeds is to use the Favorites, Favorites Bar And Feeds page of the IEAK.

Feeds are stored in the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Feeds folder. For example, the feeds for a user named Jane using the default file locations is C:\Users\Jane\AppData\Local \Microsoft\Feeds. The FeedsStore.feedsdb-ms file is a set of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) documents that stores the settings for each feed and the last time each feed was synchronized. The *.feed-ms files are used to cache content downloaded from each feed. To copy a feed to other computers, simply copy the *.feed-ms file.

Note Developers: If you want to create a program that views or modifies feeds to Internet Explorer by editing the FeedsStore.feedsdb-ms file, examine the sample program at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/rssstoreviewer.aspx.

You can configure several aspects of RSS feed behavior using Group Policy. Feed-related Group Policy settings are located within both Computer Configuration and User Configuration under Administrative Templates\Windows Components\RSS Feeds.