Just installed Office Professional Plus 2007 beta 2 which includes Word. I’ve held off on doing it until now principally as I wanted to be sure that NEO Pro, my email manager, works ok with Outlook 2007. Developer Caelo says it does although no beta version of Outlook is officially supported.

So, can I post this from Word?

I’ve gone through the steps to set up my WordPress blog using the Metaweblog API; got the confirmation that all is set up correctly for Word to post. Known issues – categories aren’t supported and the post date/time will likely be wrong.

But let’s give it a go

[Edit] Well it did work just fine. The post was successfully published. Impressive.

The date/time was definitely incorrect, though – posted with a date of January 1, 1970 at 01:59. Changed to reflect the actual date/time. I’d certainly expect this issue to be fixed asap if Word is to be taken even halfway seriously during the beta as a blogging tool.

Category not set either. Or rather, set to whatever is the default category in WordPress (in my case, General). So I’ve changed that to the categories you now see.

I have to say, though, that this is extremely impressive. If the two known issues – date/time error and categories – can be fixed quickly, then this will be a highly credible blogging tool.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

[] 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.

Related post:

Blog editors: An opportunity awaits

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.