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The Notes 8 feed reader is built into the sidebar in the Notes client. It’s fairly rudimentary in comparison to some standalone alternatives, but it has the distinct advantage of being built in. It’s one more thing that Lotus has bundled into the Notes 8 client experience.

With the Notes 8 client you have one piece of software that you can live in all day long. You can read your mail, manage your calendar, browse the web, create documents, play with widgets, and read your RSS feeds. This is pretty significant as it makes it easier for your end users. They don’t have to open a different program for each task they want to complete throughout their day.

Also, you can set up the feeds your user subscribes to when you configure their Notes client for the first time. You can subscribe them to information from Domino databases like blogs based on the IBM Blogging template or the open source Blogsphere template. Quickr has blogs, wiki’s and document libraries that have feeds as do Connections blogs and Dogear bookmarks.

IBM Lotus even ships a backend database with Domino that you can use to convert views in normal Lotus applications into RSS feeds. You can now create a view in any Lotus application and create a feed for it in a few steps. The database is still a little rough around the edges, and could probably be the subject of its own article, so we won’t go into all the details here. Just know that it can be done, and you’ll need a little help from your application developers and server admin.

Subscribing to a Feed in Notes 8

The way to subscribe to a feed in Notes 8 is easy. The first thing you have to do is find the feed at whatever website you want to subscribe to. You’ll generally see an orange RSS or XML icon, or there will be a link to “Subscribe to our feed” somewhere on the page.

For this example, I’ll use the RSS feed from my blog. I use a common service called FeedBurner that hosts my feed for me, and the feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greyhawk68. To subscribe, you do the following:

Open the Feed Reader sidebar panel in Notes

Click on the “Subscribe to Feed” icon. It’s the square orange icon with a plus sign over it

A dialog box will pop up asking you to enter the the web address or feed URL you would like to subscribe to

Enter the URL (in this case http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greyhawk68) and click GO

Subscribe Window

The Add New Subscription Window

The configuration information for the feed pops up below, tweak anything you wish and then click OK

The feed is then added into your list of feeds and you see the latest posts from that site

A list of posts in the Notes 8 Feed Reader

Clicking on a post will pop-up a window with the story in it

You can read the post in the pop-up, or you can click the Open button to go to the webpage where the post originated

Reading a post in the Notes 8 Feed Reader

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