NewsGator Inbox – Getting Started

So now that you have your system updated and you have downloaded and installed NewsGator Inbox, let’s see what it is all about!

Just a quick follow up to the last post. As I said, when you restart your Outlook after downloading the NewsGator Inbox, it will automatically run the setup. This will only happen the first time that you open Outlook after the installation.

The first thing you will probably notice is there is a new folder in your Outlook folder tree called NewsGator Inbox. If you have setup an account and used NewsGator Online then all of your online folders and feeds will be present under the NewsGator Inbox folder tree. Also if you pulled in additional feeds from Bloglines or an OPML document then they will be listed as well. Please note that these new feeds will automatically update to NewsGator Online.

Maneuvering in the NewsGator Inbox works much the same as any other operation within Outlook. That being said the actual NewsGator Inbox is not like an email inbox though. It does not receive all of the incoming posts and then you distribute them to other folders for storage or setup rules to move the posts around. Basically I found that the folders, which automatically created from my NewsGator Online account and were setup identically to the online version. The posts for each category were present in the category folder and ready to read. The main difference that I noticed was that the cumulative number of posts does not roll up to the category folder or to the “My News” folder. I am not sure if I like this or if I prefer to see the number of unread posts for each category. In order to see how many unread posts exist you have to expand the category folder. This allows you to see the feed source, for example if I open or expand my “News” folder, then I see the folder for MSNBC, NY Times, and Wired. I also see how many posts are unread in each of these feed folders. However it appears that if I were to remove all of the category folders and just have the feed folders then I would see the number of unread posts for each feed.

So basically it is up to you as to how you want the folders to appear. If you like to see how many posts are unread then you have to strip out the categories to see the number of unready posts (which, just a reminder, will affect the other NewsGator tools when it automatically syncs). If it doesn’t matter to you how many posts are unread then you can leave it as is.

Next time I will get more into the functionality of the folders and some of the tools that NewsGator has built into the Inbox to enhance your post reading experience.