Direct Blogging From Microsoft Office 2007

 Joe Friend, lead program manager at Microsoft, announced on the MSDN blog that Office users will be able to do direct publishing of blogs to the web from within Word 2007.

“Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts?
Stop, don’t jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I’m not an idiot. I’m not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you’ve ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I’m talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don’t look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?”

Friend also warns that the feature is currently in beta and that there are still some bugs.

“I had to make a few hand tweaks to my post due to bugs (I’m sure our developer would blame it on user error). I had to upload and hand code the pictures because I had problems with my FTP site. And, I had to hand change the items with the CODE tag since we didn’t map the Word code style correctly.”

– Source: Softpedia