The latest version of Office, 12.0.3111.1010, has hit the peer-to-peer networks and developer Alexander Gorlach has posted his first impressions and detailed screenshots of the subscription and reading interface.
Microsoft throttles the feed update rate and respects the TTL element. Users can override this update limit which could be pretty scary as RSS updates are currently integrated with the standard send/receive function along with e-mail and most e-mail is checked every 5 minutes or so.
Outlook 12 also supports the ability to download all enclosures for a subscription, regardless of the file type. Enclosures can deliver some nasty payloads to the desktop. Hopefully Microsoft will treat enclosures with the same caution as e-mail attachments and raise some red flags for potentially harmful content.
It’s beta software, the bits are not final, but it’s interesting to watch.