SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

One of the SharePoint configuration items that I tend to asked about is getting external RSS feeds to work, there are quite a few articles and blogs on the web that talk through specific problems, but I thought I would share my experiences with SharePoint & RSS.

So what is an RSS feed and why might we want to consume it, simply put and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a way used to publish often updated content in standard format that can be easily consumed. To find out if a site publishes an RSS feed, simply go to it and look for the RSS Feed symbol in Internet Explorer turn from Grey to Orange

then just click on the feed button to view the feed address ( examples below use BBC News)

and then then view and subscribe to the feed.

Also if you are using Outlook and sync with the Common Feed List (the one that Internet Explorer keeps)

then the feed will appear in your mailbox as well.

What does all this have to do with SharePoint I hear you ask, in a perfect world you would go to your SharePoint site, edit a page, add the RSS viewer webpart, edit the RSS Feed URL property…

… and as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared, no sorry wrong story, as if by magic your feed will be displayed…

but more often then not you get the error below… or something similar.

or if you are using the free and rather excellent Bamboo Solutions World Clock and Weather web part http://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-55-5-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx you might see the error below.

This is normally caused by one of 2 problems

Location of Proxy

Type of Windows Authentication used

Location of Proxy

If your SharePoint Web servers are located behind a proxy, they will need to know where the proxy is that traffic  needs to go through, to do this updated your web.config for the site in question (if you have multiple WFE’s don’t forget to update each one)

Backup, then edit the <defaultProxy> section to make it look like this.

<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="false">
    <proxy proxyaddress=”http://YourProxyServer” bypassonlocal="true" />
   </defaultProxy>

Type of Windows Authentication

Once you have the settings about in place, the type of authentication in use at the web application level comes into play. If you are using NTLM, then you still may have a problem as your client side credentials will not be passed on your proxy server due the ‘double hop’ issue of NTLM so you can either set a bypass rule on your proxy to allow unauthenticated traffic out or configure your web app to use Kerberos authentication, once that is resolved your web parts should work as per below.