Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't produce a blogging tool? To me, it seems a surprising omission.
AOL seems to see a commercial opportunity to interest a significant proportion of its subscribers. However, so far as I am aware Microsoft has no plans in this direction.
Microsoft already offers Office to students at a discount. Why not offer a blogging tool too?
The odd thing ... at least it seems odd to me ... is that Microsoft has many of the parts of a great blogging tool already in place but the parts have not been brought together yet.
This workflow appeals to me:
1. Collect ideas in OneNote
2. Publish to Windows SharePoint Services
Adding "Publish to Weblog" functionality to OneNote could create a great blogging tool.
I guess that custom WSS sites which allow only one person to post would produce a simple, if non-interactive blog. WSS already provides a Discussion Board option. Surely it would take only fairly minor modifications to a WSS Discussion Board to produce a blog.
Maybe add Document Workspace functionality too? To produce a new generation blogging tool.
Teachers, for example, could use OneNote to produce course notes and post them to a WSS-enabled intranet.
The potential is endless.
Windows SharePoint Services already offers useful customisation functionality, with themes and so on. FrontPage could be wheeled into the picture to add yet more options.
Anyone from Microsoft care to comment?
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 5, 2003 05:18 PM