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RSS Feeds in Screensaver



A colleague of mine who also happens to be our client came up to me asking for developing/investigating about a screensaver where we could have our corporate news displayed via the RSS feeds (atom or RSS). I think it is very interesting as you don't force people to follow news by pounding them with emails (which they never read anyways) while especially in Holland where the recent changes in Tax Laws and Health insurance will have a major impact on your budget as to how much you will pay monthly to get and stay covered. These laws will change beginning 1st Jan 2006.

There are other corporate news which are as critical for employees and students (in our case) to read. And according to a study people do leave the desk once a while and what would be a better way to welcome them back with a screensaver which will display news elegantly. No body is forced.

OK so what kind of desktop/user environment do we have?
  • We have a standard windows desktop environment
  • There is a standard policy of 15 mins and screensaver starts running
  • Users do take pauses
So all I have to do is look for some solution to have it...
  1. Checked out by calling some folks (Some company is already putting a tag of some 13,000 euros for this...sheesh!)
  2. Checked out some stuff on the net.
  3. Develop a RSS on the news page Iif it already doesn't exist, these days you have everything RSS'ed!)
  4. And deploy it through a standard desktop deployment system (We have LANDesk®)
Easy right so I go hunting, find a cool Tiger demo (real neat this) and eventually landed on this one atMSDN. The C# Express edition where I can develop a screensaver on the fly. Now can I? Let's find it out!

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