Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of Microsoft’s new Office 2007 suite. I like the new ribbon control, although like Jon Honeyball I do find Microsoft’s approach to developer licensing somewhat paranoid.

I particularly like Outlook 2007 as this offers some genuinely useful innovations. I find my life (business life, I hasten to add) revolving more and more around the To-Do bar which, in conjunction with the new Categories and Follow-Up flags, really does allow you to keep track of what needs doing when.

On the other hand, Microsoft does seem to have bungled the built-in RSS feed reader. The user interface is straightforward, nicely integrating the feeds into your mailbox. (That said, it doesn’t seem possible to track down certain properties, such as when a feed was last updated.)

The real problem, though, comes to light when you link Outlook 2007 to Exchange Server. Like many small businesses, I have Exchange Server 2003 sitting in my office connected by LAN to my office desktop and to my home PC by VPN over broadband. Both clients are configured for Cached Exchange Mode - particularly important at home so I can work offline.

The problem is that the RSS feeds are kept up-to-date by the local copy of Outlook 2007 and also synchronised with my Exchange Server mailbox. When I move from one client to the other, the copy of Outlook on the second machine proceeds to synchronise with Exchange while at the same time updating its RSS feeds locally. The end result is duplicated posts at best and general chaos at worst.

Given that I am essentially using Outlook 2007 as an Exchange Server client, surely these RSS feeds should be updated by Exchange Server? After all, in this respect, there’s no reason to treat RSS posts as any different to email messages. They’re all new records coming in to a central database.

I suspect the problem comes down to the different approaches taken by the different product teams within Microsoft. It is interesting to note that Internet Explorer 7.0 can also handle RSS feeds and furthermore, makes available a Common Feed List to all applications on the local machine, including Outlook 2007. This is apparently part of the Windows RSS Platform and is built into both IE7 and Windows Vista. However it appears to be principally a client-side solution, whereas Outlook 2007 stradles both the client and the server worlds.

Seems like a lack of joined-up government somewhere along the line. Maybe there’s a lesson for us all here.