NewsGator Inbox – Options (General)

The NewsGator team has built several options into the NewsGator Inbox, so the next few posts will discuss the NewsGator Inbox Options. This is one of the most important tools within the NewsGator Inbox drop down menu because it allows you to customize the NewsGator Inbox to fit your needs.

As with all of these tools, once you select it from the list a new window will launch. This window will include several options, such as, General options, Update Subscriptions, Folders, NewsPage, NewsGator Synchronization, and Posting. Today I will focus on the General options.

So when you select the General Options button from the NewsGator Inbox Options window a new widow launches. From here you can set NewsGator Inbox as your default feed aggregator, meaning it will override the functionality within Outlook to deliver feeds or if you have another plug in, it will override that as well. Another option is show “Subscribe in NewsGator Inbox” in your Internet Explorer menu. To be honest I am not sure what this does. I went to my Internet Explorer but was unable to find this tool anywhere in any of the menus. The next option allows NewsGator Inbox to look for new versions and you can tell it if you want it to find beta versions (not fully tested) as well.

The next option tells the NewsGator Inbox to automatically delete duplicate clippings. So if you find that the feeds you have subscribed to send out duplicates and/or if you happen to clip the same post more than once the NewsGator Inbox will automatically delete the duplicates. Although this worked very well I hoped for more from it. I think it would be great if this tool could apply universally across the inbox to remove duplicate posts. I have noticed that some feeds duplicate the posts that they push out to the subscribers and it would be nice to remove these as well. It would be even better if the NewsGator Inbox could look at which root source a feed is from and remove duplicates of those as well! For instance, if MSNBC and the NY Times both utilize an AP article, then the NewsGator Inbox could remove one of the posts.

The next tool is the one that I found the most useful. It is a tool that I spotlighted in a post last month, the Subscription Management Tool. Basically this tool will allow you to set an activation point when your inbox has a certain number of unread items. Then it will mark the posts as read starting with the oldest. What you are left with when it is done are just the most current posts marked as unread. I really like this because it focuses my attention.

The last option that you can do from this window is to set what types of files that you want treated as Podcasts. So you can decide what files will be viewed as just attachments and what will be Podcasts (usually considered music or videos). I think this is for use with NewsGator’s FeedStation because it is podcast receiver. This is a tool that allows you download multimedia content for use on a mobile device.

Next time I will explore the options for the Update Subscriptions tool.