This is just a quick note – that annoyingly, there isn’t an RSS feed web part (that functions) in Office 365. Even more frustratingly, the RSS Viewer Web Part is available, it just doesn’t work. When you add it to a page, you get the warning:

Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type is not registered as safe

This is discussed in KB2535012, the main thrust of it being:

This issue occurs because the RSS Viewer Web Part is not available in Office 365. This issue is scheduled to be resolved in a future version of Office 365.

In fairness, this restriction is mentioned in the SharePoint Online Release notes.

Alternatives? Well, they’re limited. Rene Modery has written a solution using JavaScript and the Google Feed API (which should mean that there’s some caching of the feed, albeit on Google’s servers). It’s the main alternative that I’ve come across, and it’s how I’d approach the problem, although I think that authentication between your Google server, with it’s cache, and the target feed could be tricky.

There’s more information on his approach here.

And further evidence that it might be the only reasonable approach – Raghavendra Shanbhag describes doing the same sort of thing with the zRSSFeed jQuery library.

Or, I guess the other alternative is to wait for Microsoft to fix this – and they have to, not having RSS in Office 365 SharePoint is absurd.