Windows Live Writer Beta 2 (with SharePoint 2007 support!) now available
The Windows Live Writer team just announced the availability of Beta 2 of their excellent offline blog writing tool, which now has support for the blog functionality in WSS 3.0 and consequently MOSS 2007. I’ve been using a pre-Beta 2 build of the tool to write and post blog entries here (a Community Server based blog) as well as my own blog (a MOSS based blog) for a few weeks now, and it has worked very well.
While Windows Live Writer’s support for SharePoint may be a good reason for you to seriously consider using SharePoint as your blog solution, an even better reason is coming very soon in the form of a public beta for the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition. The CKS:EBE team of volunteer shared source developers will leverage the innovative work done by Vincent Rothwell for which you can see a functional demo at http://demo.wssblogs.com. One of the key features will be the “Modular Themes Framework” (MTF), which enables practically anyone to easily create and quickly deploy and instantly change a theme that will make a SharePoint based blog look totally different from what you’d expect a SharePoint blog to look like! You can try out some of the sample themes on the demo site. Stay tuned here for upcoming announcements about the CKS:EBE and other CKS editions that will showcase the power of SharePoint as a social computing platform.
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