Go to most news delivery websites these days and you’ll see a small button, usually in a top corner, labeled “RSS” or “XML”. RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a generic XML-based format for delivering and aggregating web content. RSS files provide summary data (e.g. headline and article summaries) that can be easily accessed and transformed by other websites. This article will provide an introduction to the RSS format and illustrate how you can use the SharePoint Portal Server XML web part to easily integrate real-time news feeds into your corporate portal.

An Introduction to RSS

In its simplest form, an RSS file is XML that conforms to a specific schema. This format is designed to facilitate the communication of summary news items. The information provided in an RSS feed is limited and fixed; typically, it includes item level detail like title, description, and a URL for redirection. An organization providing an RSS feed would take the most recent news content from its site, transform the data to conform to the RSS format and expose the XML through a URL on a website. The advantage of RSS news feeds is, given the uniformity of data presentation, the ease associated with accepting and presenting news data through various client interfaces.

The RSS Format

An RSS file contains four elements: channel, image, items, and text input.

• The channel element is required and provides information about the data source. It includes detail like title, description and language.
• The image element is optional and usually includes the logo associated with the channel source.
• The item element is required and is the most important. It provides the detail associated with individual news items. It includes title, description and link data. RSS files are limited to 15 unique items. This limitation forces the amount of new content to be small and reinforces the purpose of this data feed.
• The text input element is optional and is used to allow users to respond to the channel. The text input is usually rendered as an HTML form and is typically used to handle subscriptions or searches.

Using the SharePoint XML Web Part

There are a number of RSS readers available that allow end users to reference disparate news sources. These readers retrieve the XML associated with the individual news site and transform the content to HTML for presentation. This transformation is typically done with XSL. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes an XML-based web part that allows content administrators to provide both the XML and XSL; SharePoint handles the XML/XSL combination and displays the content in HTML via the portal. Because RSS feeds are XML-based, it is very easy to create a web part that presents real-time news from an outside source. It is possible to create a SharePoint web part (they have an extension of .dwp) that contains some simple XSL and a reference to URL-based XML to display lists of news content. An end user can see the list and click on an article of interest. The business benefit is obvious; the portal provides real-time headlines for organization-specific content. An end user is no longer forced to query a specific news site. The technology benefit is just as strong. Deployment is simple (you literally drag and drop the web part onto the appropriate page) and modifications to presentation are highly flexible.

The KMA Insights RSS News Feed