EDIT: Right after posting this, I got an email from Newsgator support stating that they thought all of my issues were resolved, and apologized for the confusion. I worked with them for the past few days, and this morning, all of my issues seem to be resolved, although I figured out my remaining two on my own. First, the synchronization. I noticed that it was working, but there were still about 9,000 items that it never picked up - they were all older posts. I read all of my items in Outlook, and then went online and marked all 200 pages as read (where is the Catch Up button?). That solved that issue - now my synchronization is working beautifully. As for the plugin issue? I had a copy of the blogExtension.dll in my plugins folder, and once I removed that, it starting working. TO be fair, Nick, one of the Newsgator guys I've been corresponding with, gave me the idea to check that all files were in the proper place. Once I started digging in, I decided to try removing the extra copy of the DLL, and it started working again! Now, I'm back to being a happy Newsgator customer!

I installed Newsgator 2.5 the other day, and upgraded to the subscription service. I'm not really thrilled about the new subscription model - before I paid $29.00 for a lifetime service, and now I'm expected to pay $19.95 a year to use the software.

Having said that, they've done something very cool. If you purchased Newsgator 2.0 before March 2nd of this year, you can get a free two year subscription to their business service. That gives me a three plus years out of the software for $29. That's a great value! I don't expect to get 3 years out of any software that I buy - the world of software changes too fast.

Anyway, I got it installed, and all started out fine. Well, almost fine. The biggest new feature of Newsgator 2.5? Synchronization. Except it doesn't work for me. Right now, I have 2 unread posts in Outlook, but over 10,000 in Newsgator Online. Doesn't sound synched to me. I have a support issue opened with Newsgator. Or at least I should. I got a one sentence reply 3 days after opening my issue, and haven't heard anything in the past 5 days. But I can deal with that. I don't use Newsgator Online for the most part. It's nice to know it's there, but my laptop is with me just about everywhere I go, so I have Outlook ready to go.

Then a couple of nights ago, it decided it wasn't activated. Coincidentally, that was the same time I decided I was going to find a plug-in to post links to del.icio.us. Since it's wasn't activated, I couldn't post through Outlook. And I couldn't tell it to get feeds automatically either, although it seemed to be willing to get feeds on it's own, despite it's un-activated state. I opened another support issue, and the next day, I got a reply, fixing the problem. Very prompt service. But it only lasted a day. Again, I responded to the issue, and it was resolved within an hour.

Now though, I still can't use the plug-ins, because it's not recognizing them for some reason. And I haven't heard anything back on that issue yet.

I'm torn about Newsgator right now. I've been very happy with it, but that was when everything worked correctly. Now that I want to be able to post to del.icio.us and can't, I'm a little disappointed. That, and the subscription thing…

If RSS Bandit had an IFilter plugin for Microsoft's Desktop Search, I'd definitely consider switching back!