Entries in "integration"
Testing Word 2007 Blog Integration
It seems that Word 2007 has direct support for posting blog entries through services such as Windows Live Spaces and Blogger. While Windows Live Spaces is not surprising, is the inclusion of Blogger (a Google service) a sign that things are changing at Microsoft? What is more, they have also added support for any blog service that supports either ATOM or MetaWebLog API. After some digging, it turns out that blog.case.edu does use the MetaWebLog API, so I'm giving it a test.
If anyone else is interested in trying this out, simply tell Word 2007 to make a New Blog Post (Office Menu -> New -> Blog post). A wizard will come up asking if you'd like to register with a Blog service – tell it yes, and then for the provider, specify 'Other'. Enter your Case ID and password, make sure 'MetaWebLog' is selected as the API, and enter http://blog.case.edu/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi as the Blog Post URL. If you'd like to have Word automatically upload images to your Filer space, it's really quite simple. When prompted for your Image Provider's information, select 'My own server' from the list, enter https://filer.case.edu/dav/abc123 as the Upload URL (use your own Case ID instead of abc123), and http://filer.case.edu/abc123 as the Source URL (again use your own Case ID here). Finish the wizard and you should be good to go.
What is interesting is that this is a great example of how powerful web services can be. Once your account is set up, you can 'Open Existing' to open any blog posts you've made (even ones you didn't make through Word) for revision or just to look over. You can insert category and tag info into your post (caveat: this was the only thing I haven't been able to get working so far – seems like a bug). Word even has some integration with image hosting providers (none are preloaded yet, though it does support WebDAV interfaces such as Filer). All this works because the MetaWebLog API provides a list of functions to any API client (in this case, Word). These functions are standardized though a number of RFCs so that anyone can make an interoperable blog client or host as long as they abide by the contracts set forth in the RFC documents. Word and the blog.case.edu server then communicate by transferring XML documents which represent the client's requests and the server's responses. Again these XML documents follow a standardized schema which must be adhered to in order for clients and servers to communicate successfully.
The surprise is that the folks at Microsoft have not created their own 'better' schema and API, nor have they 'embraced-and-extended' the existing ones. Instead they have put their ego in check to produce a very impressive, interoperable piece of software. It seems that in the past year or so we've really seen a breath of fresh air at Microsoft, and hopefully we can look forward to more cool, interoperable products in the future.