Displaying Sharepoint (or other authenticated) RSS feeds in Xibo

I'm a big fan of Xibo, the Open Source Digital Signage platform.  We've been able to achieve with this what could've cost tens of thousands of dollars to achieve with a commercial system.

Xibo is a client-server based system for running "Digital Signage" (big LCD screens displaying information) in an organisation.  It's centralised and flexible enough to allow multiple screens with the same or different layouts, and it supports a variety of content types.

One type of content supported in Xibo is RSS tickers.  Information from an internal or external RSS feed can be scrolled vertically or horizontally across a display layout.  This was a particularly interesting feature for us, as we have a lot of information stored in Microsoft Sharepoint, much of which is available as an RSS feed.  The problem was that Sharepoint isn't usually a public website and requires authentication to access it and the RSS feeds.  Xibo doesn't support authenticating to a website for RSS content, so we've come up with a simple workaround.

NOTE - This works with sites that use authentication methods like basic auth and NTLM auth.  Any site that requires a forms-based login (where the login box is part of the webpage itself), won't work.  Also, I believe curl can be made to work with Kerberos authentication but have no experience with it.

The easy solution is to have the Xibo server run a cron job that pulls down the RSS feed to it's own webserver directory, effectively republishing the RSS in a location that doesn't require authentication.  We did this using wget, and then later using curl, we run either of these commands as a cron job every 5 minutes:

wget --http-user=user --http-password=password -O /srv/www/htdocs/rssfeed.xml http://sharepoint.domain.com/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List={0C3893F7-DA14-4755-9FCC-5522532C9DBC}

OR

curl --anyauth --user user:password http://sharepoint.domain.com/_layouts/15/listfeed.aspx?List=%7BEF86A7FD-BED2-481A-8EE8-5F7D298AD644%7D >/srv/www/htdocs/rssfeed.xml

In this example, either wget or curl login to Sharepoint and grab the RSS xml file and dump it in the root of the webserver directory.  In our case this happens on the Xibo server, but any webserver is good.  We then point the Xibo layout at the RSS URL on the Xibo server.

The reason we've used curl and wget at one time or another is about compatibility.  Some versions of wget have limited support for authentication schemes like NTLM, if that causes a problem for you, try curl.