Internal "News Crawler" for Outlook/OWA?

Hackerspace Software Development
#1

So a friend and I were talking about some stuff, and he says “what we need is a ticker that scrolls informational messages across the display in Outlook/Outlook Web”.
We figure something like this exists, but our search-fu is failing us.
Anyone ever seen/heard of such a thing?
If so, that works with 365 services?

I’m borrowing the image from here for this illustration:

outlook2016_appearance1_with_crawler1
outlook2016_appearance1_with_crawler1.jpeg1650×886 174 KB

and from here for the web client illustration:

3-Outlook-Office-365-Mailto-example-crawler1
3-Outlook-Office-365-Mailto-example-crawler1.jpg1300×795 137 KB

I’d like to be able to change the color of the text/box (red for “emergency stuff”, yellow for “alerts”, white/blue for announcements, that sort of thing) and have a simple way to input the messages scrolling across news-ticker style:
like the scrolling text @ the bottom of this cast


or if we wanted to get truly fancy:

Anybody got anything along these lines?
Thanks much!

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#2

Anybody got anything along these lines?
Thanks much!

Not sure for outlook itself, but there might be a userscript for that.

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#3

Would a sharepoint news ticker app work?

I haven’t used office in ages but the video looks like you can create essentially an RSS feed and plug it into Outlook.

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#4

I get the impression @jast is looking to have the emails subjects show up in that area as a ticker.

If that’s the case then one can use https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2014/02/12/email-to-rss-feed/ as a guide for turning an email mailbox into an rss feed then pipe that into this News Ticker Webpart app (or any other rss app).

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#5

I can see where you’d think that, since I want to use an email platform, but no.
I want this to be completely separate from email.
I want to be able to put in news (Donald Trump Elected President!), announcements (Halfprice on Latte!), etc. into a ticker which scrolls across the Outlook interface (because Outlook is the ONE THING people are probably going to have open, and I think a scrolling marquee might get more notice than an email, the ignoring of which is what we’re trying to circumvent).
So I’m thinking there is, or should be, a “plug in” for Outlook to allow a news scroll where I type in custom messages, and it gets crawled across the user’s outlook display…
If there exists such a thing to feed an RSS/ATOM feed into a marquee/crawler/ticker display in outlook, that could work, but feeding i into an email (which is what Outlook already does with RSS feeds) will be summarily ignored, just as is happening now with the type of info I’d like to crawl.

Or maybe I’m utterly full of shit, and this is just the dumbest thing ever. I have those ideas pretty frequently, too. :slight_smile:

#6

yeah, I’m going to point out that both google and yahoo tried that and it failed. Just too much information overload to the user.

Not saying it isn’t a good idea just not one which is going to be adopted because well we’re monkeys that have squirrel like attention spans.

Not sure if one is open to coding in C# but there’s a tutorial on creating addins for outlook. And if I was to do one then it would be as a toolbar and hook into outlook rss feeds functions.

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#7

Not sure if one is open to coding in C# but there’s a tutorial1 on creating addins for outlook.

Yep, this is probably going to be a custom Outlook Addin

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