RSS News Feed Integration with Office 365, SharePoint and more

​RSS Feeds can be integrated and synchronized codeless with various other data sources, on-premise or in the cloud, using the Layer2 Cloud Connector. Several formats like Atom or RSS with custom fields are supported. Please take a look here for systems and applications to connect to.​​​​

In the Layer2 Cloud Connector the data source entity must be configured as follows to connect to RSS Feeds.

Fig.: Sample configuration to connect to a Yahoo RSS News Feed using the Layer2 Cloud Connector. 

RSS News Feed Specific Configuration Settings

​Please note the following about specific settings, features and possible issues.

• Please select the Layer2 Data Provider for RSS Feeds (comes with the Cloud Connector distribution package). If it is not in the list, please install from package.
• As the connection string in most cases the Url parameter is enough. Additional parameters are available for Authentication (anonymous by default) and FeedType (RSS or Atom). 
• For verification please use url=http://news.yahoo.com/rss/internet/
• To aggregate several news feeds with one connection, please add several urls: url=url1, url2, url3 ...
• Uni-directional sync is supported only because RSS is read-only.
• For data aggregation please make use of the no-delete flag on the data target side. E.g. you can aggregate several RSS News Feeds to a SQL table or SharePoint list with no delete for archiving and search.
• You need a primary key (column with unique values) for the synchronization to work as expected. In many cases the link to the certain news works for this. Some providers also expose a unique GUID.
• Note that lots of systems and applications offer RSS feeds for data integration, e.g. SharePoint and Office 365.
• Many feeds provide a "source" attribute that could be helpful to separate the data sources in case of aggregations.
• HTML formatted fields, e.g. for description, are fully supported.
• Custom attributes / columns are exposed if provided by the data source (not only title, description, link).

Do you have any issues to connect? Please contact [email protected] for next steps.

Step-by-Step Intros For Specific RSS Feeds Integration Scenarios

​You will find more information about specific scenarios here:

• How to connect and sync RSS News Feeds with SharePoint or Office 365

You are looking for other scenarios? Please contact [email protected] for any help.

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