I just love Word using Word as a client tool for publishing blogs. It is a really good example of software + services model.
For years I have been working with different end users that are using custom and Microsoft solutions to create web content.
While using Word as you web/blog editor key benefits for end users are:
• Word is a familiar interface, and users know how to use it (they do not need to learn a new tool)
• Most features are really easy to use (e.g. picture resizing)
• User does need to know anything about web concepts (e.g. Word will optimize/publish your images as separate files)
• Extra features available (spell-check, formatting, tables, smart art)
From Word you can publish to 6 blogging platforms, but I mostly use it with Windows SharePoint Services, and I am just missing one thing here: inability to activate blog features on any site.
In WSS 3.0 blogs are only available as site templates so you must have a separate site for each blog. While talking about blogs it does not make sense to have more than one blog on a SharePoint site, but you could use blog feature as announcements list or something else. It would be great if one could simply put a number of “blog” on a single site.
In my next posts I will try to describe how to overcome some of the above mentioned limitations.
