As most people know, Microsoft Word 2007 supports embedded blogging. Unfortunately it doesn't work with Vertigo blogs (CS 1.1) so I had to actually copy/paste this post from Word to CS' post editor.

Too bad it didn't work, as my initial impression with Word blogging is that it is really easy to use. The good news is it actually uploads clean HTML, none of the gunk HTML that Word is so well known for in past versions.

Advantages

  • Spell checking: I initially misspelled Word as Wrod and it fixed the spelling automatically for me. Even the previous "Wrod" has the well known red squiggly underneath it.
  • Posting as Published or Draft.
  • Having the nice large Style selector in the ribbon or the task bar on the right is really convenient.
  • Saving posts locally as an ongoing work.

Disadvantages

  • Does not support categories.
  • Image support is flaky. It only supports FTP and HTTP (WebDAV). If you select FTP, images are uploaded to your specified FTP site and the embedded image urls point to the FTP location. Also if you update a post with an image, Word will upload the same pictures again and abandon the old pictures. For those who like to edit their posts frequently, like myself, this will get annoying really fast.
  • No HTML view. I can understand how HTML view might not be suited for an environment such as Word, but since I couldn't post this directly from Word to my Vertigo blog, there is no way for me to cut and paste this content while keeping all the formatting.
  • Does not allow editing post metadata. What I mean is the post date, an excerpt, comments customization, etc. When you use Word to create a post, you are trusting Word will set these values correctly.
  • And to follow up on the previous point, my experience with Word 2007 Beta 2 blogging support shows that it has trouble with dates and times. I've tried it on different blog servers and each exhibits some weird problem. The date could be off by a few hours, or up to a few years! The problem could be related to this post, so I won't blame Word completely on this issue.

So as you can see, using Word as blogging client is a mixed bag. While it does have a nice UI and makes the simple things really easy (ie. posting only text), it also has faults that make blogging much more complicated than need be. To me, Word blogging support still feels like a hack added in at the last minute. However, I can definitely see the potential here, so if the Word team can iron out some of these bugs and add some more flexibility, Word can definitely become the next killer app for bloggers!

How is it a hack? Well take a look at this error message:

Besides the spelling and grammar mistakes, it looks like someone took the lazy way out in catching errors. The only way to diagnose the source of this problem is to use a http proxy to take a look at the xml being passed between your desktop and the server.

As for not working with Vertigo blogs? Well it's Community Server's problem, not Word's blogging problem. I have successfully tried Word blogging on many other blogging engines, including CS 2.0 which works, so I know it's not Word's problem.

*Edit*

Here's my experience with Word 2007 support with WordPress.