While I can't FTP from within the corporate firewall, I can blog. One of the ideas I think is fresh in Information Center is the concept of 'mixing' and sharing RSS content.
The following set of screen grabs step you through how this works.
(1) Navigating through content, I see an item that I want to add to a mix, in this case Episode 58 of Diggnation.
(2) Click the Add to Mix button, and the 'Add to Mix' dialog appears. Select the Mix name you want to add this to.So far this is similair to a playlist in a music player application - but trust me, it gets better.
(3) As I browse, I add other items to my mix. In this case I add the August 21st Dilbert cartoon.
(4) You may have noticed there's an item titled 'Manage Mixes' in the guide.
Clicking on this shows list of mixes you've built, and clicking on a mix shows you which items are there.You can remove items from a mix, you can remove a mix altogether, but most importantly, you can share a mix.
(5) Clicking Share Mix, brings up a mail dialog (mail server setup is in the config section).
I enter the information and click send. My mix is then sent to the recipient, in this case that's me at my microsoft address.
It's important to note that what I'm sending is not the graphics for the dilbert cartoon or the video for diggnation. I'm sending an RSS Channel that was created on-the-fly, behind the scenes through Information Center (a mix is an RSS feed)
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(6) I receive an email. It's my shared 'Mix'. Because Information Center registers the file extension .IC, the infocenter icon is located next to the mix name. Note that the file is only 3k. We are not passing around the actually 200+ meg diggnation video or the dilbert graphic. We are passing around meta-data that says where the information can be found. You can now share information in a context without having to embed the heavy media and document objects.
(7)
Opening the item, triggers the launch of Information Center. It knows it is starting up from a file, and takes you directly to your mix
We can now see the mix. I can see all of the items that were shared and can access them.
If I go back to the UI, I can see that in the my mixes tab in the guide, Marc is listed as one of my mixes.In addition to making them shareable so that other people can see, you can access them through information center as well.Think about it - this effectively let's you build your own channels for your personal use and sharing from content provided by any number of individuals. For example, if I wanted to go through a number of blogs and pull out all of the items relevant on a topic - say Security in Windows Communication Foundation - I could reference content from all of the sites in a single mix.If a colleague of mine in Europe asked me - I want to learn more about security in WCF, can you help me out ? - I can simply share my mix with him, and he has all of the information quickly.In addition to technical content, you can build mixes with things like YouTube videos, etc. It starts getting really powerful.
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