MSN feed setup and configuration

In this article

Supported feed formats

Secure feed delivery

Authentication options

Document encoding

Feed size limits and error handling

Extending feed metadata

Geographic market publishing policy

Hosting requirements for media files

Supported feed formats

MSN supports the following feed types:

• RSS 2.0

• ATOM

• Subsets of Media RSS

• Namespaces including Dublin Core and proprietary Microsoft Ingestion Services (MI)

Each feed must use UTF-8 encoding by default or specify another valid format in the XML prolog.

Secure feed delivery

• Only HTTPS feed URLs are supported.

• TLS/SSL encryption is required.

• IP whitelisting is not supported.

• Feeds with usernames or passwords in URLs will be rejected.

Authentication options

Authentication is optional but supported:

MSN supports basic authentication as specified in RFC 7517. To add basic authentication to your feed, provide​​​​​​​:

• Username

• Password

• Secure HTTPS feed URL

To add OAuth 2.0 authentication to your feed, provide:

• Security token server URL

• Client_ID

• Grant_Type

• Scope (optional; used to indicate access level. This value will be sent as-is)

• Secured feed URL​​​​​​​​​​​​

Document encoding

MSN uses UTF-8 encoding by default. You can override this by declaring a different encoding in your XML declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

Feed size limits and error handling

• Maximum feed size is 10MB

• Maximum image size is 14MB.

MSN recommends maintaining a feed size of less than 30 fresh items at all times, but you can use ATOM’s Feed paging feature to enable sliding window ingestion of your feed.

MSN automatically triggers an escalation if ingested content is more than three days old. If you have different content age requirements, contact us at partnerhubsupport@microsoft.com. MSN re-tries feeds that have errors, but if the errors persist you will be notified to investigate. MSN automatically turns off content ingestion from feeds that remain in an error state for a prolonged period of time.

Extending feed metadata

You can extend feed vocabulary and terms in XML-based feeds along with their recommended prefix. MSN only recognizes elements and attributes explicitly specified in the listed code examples. Any unsupported namespace will be ignored.

Geographic market publishing policy

MSN Partners will have their content published in the market for which they signed the contract, with the exception of Canada. Canadian partners may choose to publish their content in both the English and French markets.

Hosting requirements for media files