Per request
Per Dianna’s request, in the comments, here are my first impressions of IntraVnews:
First off, I’m running it with Outlook 2003, on an older type laptop running Windows 2000, with only 128MB of RAM, so YMMV. But, I’ve found that with about 80 channels subscribed, it doesn’t run as slow as I was afraid it might. Yes, it slows down Outlook considerably when it’s updating feeds, but with more RAM and a faster processor I’m betting it’s not a big deal at all. On dialup it’s a little worse, but then everything is a little worse with dial up. 🙂
The big advantage to having your aggregator sitting inside Outlook though is the ability to use Outlook functions with your news items! I can forward an item right from Outlook to someone who might be interested in it, or I can flag an item to spend more time looking at it later myself. That’s not as easy to do in other aggregators. It did import my OPML file pretty easily. I didn’t import the other folks OPML files the way I have with my work desktop (I’m up to about 250 feeds there now!) because I don’t anticipate this becoming the main place I read my news. It’s a laptop after all. 🙂
The other issue on that front is that it’s free to use on my personal laptop but I’d have to buy a license to use it in the “commercial” environment of work. Of course since it’s not compatible with Outlook 2000, I can’t really use it at work anyway, which is why I’ve never looked into any of the Outlook aggregators all that deeply before. Work is where I do most of my major feed reading, so aggregators I use elsewhere are really more to keep up with feeds that I want to be able to read even if I’m away from work for a few days.
Overall I do like IntraVnews and would recommend it if you’re interested in aggregating within Outlook, (of course I’ve been using it for all of 2 days so that opinion is not set in stone). If you’re using a different email program or want to view your news in a browser there are other options out there.
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