Lots can change in four years

I’m glad to see Microsoft is actually doing some cool things in the four years it’s had to develop Office 2007. As I understand it, the whole deal is supposed to ship by year’s end, and one of the neato features is that Word 07 will be able to publish to blogs (i.e. write your post in word, then update it without going to your web front-end.)

From Zdnet:

At the other end of the scale, Word 2007 will enable users to create, edit and publish posts to their blog. In the just-released Beta 2 edition of Office 2007 Word supports MSN Spaces, Blogger, Community Server and SharePoint Server 2007 through a simple drop-down menu.

“(The final product) will also publish to WordPress and TypePad through the drop-down,” says Joe Friend, lead program manager on Word 2007. “Word will also publish to anyone else via the MetaWeblog and Atom APIs we’re supporting, so any developer can add another blog system to this menu. We’ll work with existing blogging providers and also make a mechanism for discovering how to set up other systems” Friend told ZDNet Australia.