Microsoft adds a blog editor to Word 2007
Microsoft is hip to the latest trends on the Internet, and blogging will be a part of the user experience with Office 2007. Joe Friend, lead program manager for Word 2007, discussed in his blog that Word 2007 will offer blog authoring and publishing.
The beta feature is available with Office 2007 Beta 2 and makes all of the perks that customers are used to when writing in Word available for blog postings. This includes spell checking, autocorrect, strikethrough and the ability to insert/upload pictures. Microsoft will also offer basic FTP support with the blogging engine.
As of now in Beta 2, MSN Space, SharePoint 2007, Blogger and Community Server are supported. Microsoft also gives you the ability to create a custom account with any service that supports metaweblog API or ATOM API. Here what Joe has to say on the way HTML is handled:
That's right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).
All things considered, this looks like to be a nice feature addition to Office 2007. Give the popularity of blogging these days, anything that can be done to make the experience as seamless as possible seems like a win-win for users.
"So if you want to save the planet, feel free to drive your Hummer. Just avoid the drive thru line at McDonalds." -- Michael Asher
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