I pulled the trigger and bought a copy of NewsGator today. I live, breathe, and dream in Outlook and it is by far the best solution I have found to date for reading news via RSS. I have been a long-time Radio user and will most likely continue to maintain my weblog there, but the aggregator has been giving me fits lately. Once I installed NewsGator I discovered that I was missing a lot of content by relying on the aggregator in Radio alone.
I think NewsGator also lowers the “friction” for deploying weblogs and other RSS based tools in the enterprise for project management and information sharing. I have demonstrated Radio in the past and most folks seem to have a hard time getting past the fact that they will have to install another application to read RSS feeds. When I show them the content in Outlook they get it – I think it is going to lower the acceptance barrier in many organizations.
It was pretty trivial to setup and get running. I downloaded the plug-in that allowed me to post to Radio and had to configure the proxy settings to get the subscriptions up and running. I was able to easily add all of my subscriptions by importing my subscriptions opml file from Radio.
More comments later.