Word 2007 Adds Blog Posting Tool

Microsoft Word 2007 will sport the last-minute addition of a blog post authoring tool when the software rolls into Beta 2 in the next week or two, the Office 2007 development team announced Friday.

The feature will be accessible from Word 2007's File/Publish menu, and will support direct posting of blog entries in Beta 2 to Microsoft's MSN Spaces and SharePoint 2007, Google's Blogger.com, and Community Server, a collaboration platform Microsoft uses for its own MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) blogs.

According to Joe Friend, a lead program manager on the Word development team, the blog post tool automatically encodes styles such as boldface into HTML, and after some setup, will auto-upload any images added to the blog.

Word 2007 is the Office 2007 update to Microsoft's application suite. Currently, the bundle is in limited testing, but a widespread beta will be released within the next couple of weeks, an Office 2007 evangelist said on his blog. Users can register for Office 2007's Beta 2 here.

The finished suite is expected to ship in the fall.