Smiling Goat

I love RSS. It is the best way to keep up with all of my favorite blogs, like the Scott Adams Blog (Dilbert), Scott Berkun's blog, and of course, Joel Oleson, Asif Rehmani, Shane Young... and the 15 or so most interesting SharePoint blogs out there.

Using the RSS Web Part is great. You can have all of your favorite blogs delivered to your MySite. However, SharePoint does not allow internal SharePoint RSS feeds unless you are using Kerberos authentication. Unfortunately, the company where I work does not currently use Kerberos, so, my internal SharePoint RSS feeds were - up until recently - non-existent.

But there is a workaround - as there is for most challenges in SharePoint. It's called the Smiling Goat Feedreader, which is available on Codeplex here - http://feedreader.codeplex.com/

The good:
It was extremely easy to install and deploy. It is simple for end-users to configure, and it surfaces RSS feeds for lists and libraries very smoothly with almost no cost to page load time. And the name always makes people smile!

The bad:
There is not a lot of documentation out there on this web part, which is one of the main challenges of freeware or shareware in general, and therefore, our security team was initially a bit squeamish about loosing a freeware web part in our production environment. If this is a concern for your security folks, make sure it is fully tested in your lower environments first. (Although, that said, Microsoft does refer to the web part favorably in some of their technet articles.)

Another annoyance is that the designer's initials show on the Web Part Title bar and there is no way to remove them. If you have a fussy site admin, they will not like this.

However, the advantages definitely outweigh the drawbacks. It is nice to finally get internal feeds on important document libraries and lists delivered right to my MySite or my own private pages. Our site admin likes it because always the 10 most recent documents display from the library, so it keeps her site current.

The Kerberos requirement for internal feeds does not change with SharePoint 2010. But don't let that get your goat! Instead, get the Smiling Goat!