Could this be the killer application for Windows users for managing and editing blogs? Hot news from Joe Friend, a lead program manager on the Word 2007 software design team:
[…] We’ve been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That’s right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.
Definitely, Joe! I’m pretty sure there will be armies of bloggers out there who will be extremely pleased if they could manage their blogs entirely from within Office.
By including this capability seamlessly within Office, you’ll have a tool that will make it a simpler matter for organizations to enable employees to blog. It would be one big step forward in making it even easier for anyone to get started with blogging:
[…] In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we’re still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.
That’s the key thing – support for the metaweblog and Atom APIs. If Word 2007 ships with that support, you will be able to use Word as your blogging app on just about every major blog platform.
I think this will be a real winner. Perhaps the killer app for making blogging simple. See Joe’s post (and the comments) for more details including screenshots.
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9 responses to “Word 2007 supports blogging”
MSFT validation for the blog metaphor changes the market. IMO this pushes the argument that blogigng is no longer a medium people can ignore. Provided they get the API issues sorted out. It’s one of the reasons I want a strong MSFT – even if I am currently a Mac bigot. It also gives me a reason to consider MSFT Office again.
While I haven’t seen the Word beta myself yet, I think this will be a winner, Dennis. API support is the critical key to it.
HAH! I just KNEW this was the reason for the delay in Windows and Office! Okay, I thought it probably was going to be via Outlook rather than Word (which still makes more sense to me for shorter blog posts), but I guess that Word is more ubiquitous than Outlook (some clients of mine use Novell GroupWise instead of Outlook, but still use the rest of the Office suite).
I agree with Dennis that having Microsoft actively championing blogging (I reckon they will make a big deal of it in their PR activities leading up to the release) is a massive step forward for the legitimacy of blogging.
Yeah, Uncle Bill!
Now wait for Macromedia to incorporate it into Dreamweaver…
Word 2007 supports blogging…
I knew it! Back a few episodes of For Immediate Release ago (I can’t remember which exact one), Neville and Shel and I engaged in a fractured conversation about blog editing software. ‘Fractured’ because I had ranted in yet another of my reports ab…
It makes sense to have this capability in Word – that’s the app you use for just about all your writing so no need to even think about which app you need to use.
That’s an interesting point re Dreamweaver, Lee. Equal sense for website editing/managing tools to include blog capability.
And OneNote now has it, too! Yippee!! see: http://leehopkins.net/2006/05/16/clippings-from-the-bettercomms-garden-2/
[…] Word is obviously still in beta and according to Joe Friend on the Office team [via Neville Hobson] this was a late addition. […]
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