A SharePoint List RSS Feed

An evaluator of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint asked how to share the team tasks with others in the organization via an RSS feed.

We made a demo to explain how, and as we think more users can find this information useful it has now been published on the Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint Demonstrations page.

Same for all lists
Even if the tutorial shows how to create an RSS feed for the Kanban Task Manager task list, the principle is the same for all SharePoint lists. Therefore you might benefit from watching the demo even if you don't use the kalmstrom.com solution for task and project management.

Drag and drop tasks in SharePoint
Kanban Task Manager uses Outlook Tasks or SharePoint Tasks – or both, as the two versions can be combined.

On a virtual kanban board in Outlook or SharePoint, color coded tasks can be dragged and dropped between phases as the work process proceeds. This gives a good visualization of how projects and tasks are developing.

One subsite per team
Most organizations who use Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint prefer to activate the solution on one subsite per work group, so that each team has its own Kanban Task Manager.

On that site they will have the kanban board, the settings lists and everything else needed to use Kanban Task Manager. The site may of course also be used for other things that should be shared within the same team, like documents and calendars.

Share the kanban board
When all the Kanban Task Manager SharePoint subsites have the same top navigation, managers can easily go from one subsite to another to supervise the work.

However, in some cases managers prefer other ways of viewing the tasks, or maybe other members of the organization need to read the tasks of one or more workgroups. Then you can use an RSS feed.

The KTM Tasks list
The visualized tasks are displayed on the kanban board page, and that is where team members work with them. The kanban board page gets the tasks from a standard SharePoint list, KTM Tasks, and this is the list you should map with the RSS reader.

HelpDesk OSP
What I have advised above is valid for all task lists, so if you have connected Outlook to a SharePoint Task list with HelpDesk OSP and want to share that list with an RSS feed you can follow the same process: allow RSS feeds in the site collection as well as on the site, set text over 256 characters to be truncated and allow the RSS feed.

Outlook default
Outlook is the default RSS reader for SharePoint, and in the demo I show the 2013 versions of both. Outlook and SharePoint must have the same version number for the RSS feed to work, so if you have a SharePoint 2010 site you must map the feed to an Outlook 2010 installation.

Should you prefer another RSS reader, make sure it supports feeds from SharePoint. If it does, it will work with the your SharePoint lists also.

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions