One of the cool things about my day job is that I get to work with over a dozen teams all over Microsoft who are interested in consuming our Web services. This means that sometimes I get juicy scoops which I have to sit on for months before I can talk about them. One example, is the feature described in Joe Friend's blog post Blogging from Word 2007 where he writes

We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software.
...
This is pretty standard stuff if you've ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.

I met with Joe's team a few months ago and was pleased to hear they were going to add this feature to Word 2007. I've been working with them on this feature for a while and now that we actually have an official blog posting tool coming out of Microsoft, it's time for me to start investing more time in looking at exposing more of our blog-related features via an API.

This is definitely cool news. If you are a blogger that uses Microsoft Word, you definitely need to give it a try. They've gone out of their way to build a product that is easy to use and doesn't stomp on your expectations of a blogging tool (i.e. no nasty HTML for one). Mad props to Krista, Joe Friend and all the other folks who worked on getting this out the door.