On Monday I wrote an article about Office Live and Google Apps. In that article I said:

Neither has any blogging capability whatsoever.

I was corrected on this concerning the Microsoft offering. By whom? The Microsoft Office Live Team themselves (see comments in that article).

Microsoft Office Live does do blogs and rather easily by using Live Spaces.

This is how it’s done:

When you’re using the Web Design Tool inside the admin panel, you click inside an editable area, then click the Module button, then Live Spaces blog. After that you just type in the URL of the Spaces blog (i.e. your-username.spaces.live.com). The blog does have to be active first.

Looks like this:

After you add in your Spaces blog, just save and it’s done and live instantly.

Kudos to Microsoft for putting blogging ability into their Office Live Small Business offering. This is definitely a very cool feature and moreover easy and usable.

Much thanks to the MS team for pointing this out because I consider it essential that businesses - including small ones - should be able to blog easily. Spaces combined with Office Live Small Business takes care of that in short order.

If there is any be-all/end-all blog writing utility out there that classifies as the best, it’s Windows Live Writer. For all the bungling that Microsoft does with its other products, WLW is one that actually shines and does so very well.

Why is this? Because it does what any good blog authoring tool should do - author to just about anywhere. WordPress, Live Spaces, LiveJournal, MovableType and several others. It is not Microsoft proprietary to just its Live services alone (if it were it would never be used).

In addition it the the absolute easiest image placement. You can literally copy/paste any image into WLW and it will understand it, format it, create thumbnails, allow for drop shadows, “photopaper” effects plus actual image editing like black/white filter, tones and so on. This is what we call powerful.

The best part about using WLW is that it’s a true WYSIWYG. What you type and the images you place is what ends up when you post. It’s like having a “lite” version of Word that’s really, really quick. Want to insert a YouTube video, hit SHIFT+F11, paste the code, then CTRL+F11 to go back. Want to bring up a panel to select/create a category, add keywords and so on? Press F2. Press it again to hide the panel.

It is rare that I can compliment an app made by Microsoft this much.

I’ll put it to you this way: Even Mac people really dig this product. It’s that good. And yeah it’s a shame WLW doesn’t have a Mac version (and don’t say “Ecto” - it’s not as good and you have to pay for it).