Blogging in SharePoint with Windows Live Writer

It’s no secret now that Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer is a blogging application that has integrated support for WSS 3.0 blogs (like mine here at PointBridge).

I’ve written my last six or seven posts using this utility, and I’m thoroughly impressed with how the Live team nailed this app! Here are my favorite features:

Offline support. While I’m usually online, it’s very often my offline time that presents the opportunity to blog. WLW allows me to save drafts offline and post them when they’re complete.

Ridiculously simple integration with SharePoint. It took me about 15 seconds to connect to our blog site and set up WLW to post there. The configuration screen looks like this:

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All I had to do was give it the URL and my credentials, and it connects to SharePoint, pulls down all of the categories defined on my blog, all the styling (so that it can render a full preview and maintain consistency in posts); pretty much all I had to do was write and click "Publish." Nice!

Great support for inline images. For me, blogging in the out-of-the-box SharePoint rich text editor was painful (at best). Oh, it works fine, but doing things like including images is a chore. I’d have to upload all of the images I wanted to include to SharePoint, then reference each by URL in the text editor using this wonderful dialog:

Let me tell you: that was a ton of fun on posts like this one.

No more. WLW allows me to insert pictures into the blog posting and get a WYSIWYG view of them in the post. When I click "Publish," WLW uploads them to SharePoint as a attachments to the blog post and automatically puts in the appropriate URL reference so that they appear properly in the post.

Here’s what this post looks like in progress:

And there’s more. The items above are my personal reasons for blogging exclusively in WLW now, but the app also has a number of other compelling features.

If you’re posting on any of the blog platforms that WLW supports, I highly recommend checking out this utility. But if you’re blogging on SharePoint, you NEED Windows Live Writer!