I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for some time to post to various SharePoint blogs I’ve had over the years. I’ve found it very convenient to be able to write blog posts off-line while I’m traveling and then post them once I gain access to my network. The functionality of Live Write has been fairly good, but not good enough for it to be great. Well, I’ve just downloaded the latest version of the Windows Live Suite, Windows Live Essentials 2011, and I have to say that I’m very, very impressed with the enhancements to several of the applications that I use. Some of these changes will, quite honestly, make me a frequently user of this increasingly powerful Microsoft application suite.
Automatic Linking [Live Writer]
See the word ‘SharePoint’ in the paragraph above, the one with the hyperlink to the Microsoft SharePoint page? As I was typing the word into Live Writer, Live Write linked it to the Microsoft SharePoint site with a URL I provided in the Automatic Linking configuration area. Every time, from this point forward, I write the word “SharePoint” in a blog posting, it will be hyperlinked to the URL I setup. This makes it extremely easy to have a wealth of links stored and available and simply refer my readers to them by typing in the words I’ve associated with the URL. Now, having the word ‘SharePoint’ linked EVERY time I write it in a blog post would make the post appear a little strange (to me, at least), so I’ve checked the box at the bottom of the Automatic Linking setup screen to “Link to each term only once per post”. That’s VERY cool! Now the links won’t be overwhelming within my posts.
Posting Categories and Tags [Live Writer]
Posting categories, tags and posting dates are at the top of the screen where you can more easily get to them rather than in the lower-right corner of the Writer screen where they are an after thought. This whole idea of tagging content with metadata is a key tenet of SharePoint and should be a focus for everything that you produce as an information worker. Making it easy to tag content in Live Writer as easy as adding metadata to the Document Information Panel in the Office applications, brings tagging to the forefront of your blog postings, making it easier for your readers to find content of interest quickly and easily.
Microsoft Services Integration [Live Writer]
Windows Live Writer integrates nicely with Microsoft’s SkyDrive so that you can easily store all of the content you need for your Blog in a publicly available location while also being able to modify permissions to the content. This is especially important when you use a lot of different media in your blog postings. I’m not a SkyDrive user but I am running across it more and more often with SharePoint professionals that I know. Now that Live Writer sees it as simply another information storage location, I think it’s time I check into it.
Access to my Word Press Blog [Live Writer]
My blog, SharePointLee, is hosted on a Word Press provider. The fact that this is a Word Press blog doesn’t cause any issues with Live Writer, however. Not only can I easily post content to my Word Press blog but I can also access several of the most important areas of Word Press directly from Live Writer, namely the Word Press Dashboard and the comments management function. It took care of all of the linkages to these various areas for me given that I identified that I was using a Word Press blog. It works in a similar fashion with a SharePoint Blog, making it easy for me to post and access areas of importance as the blog owner. This version gives me the ability to post to several different blogs from the same computer, as the prior version did. This is really convenient as it allows me to post to both the Word Press platform as well as to other SharePoint blogs that I may be using, both on my company’s servers as well as at client locations.
Of course, Windows Live Essentials 2011 has more to it than Windows Live Writer 2011. There are several applications that make up the suite and they all have a new look and feel as well as new functionality:
- Microsoft Messenger
- Photo Gallery
- Movie Maker
- Writer
- Bing Bar
Movie Maker
The application in this suite that I’m personally most interested in is Microsoft Movie Maker. I’ve tried several versions of Microsoft Movie Maker and they always left me feeling as though this application was an after thought. It consistently crashed on me when I was doing even the most basic of edits and it simply didn’t have the power that was required to edit the videos I was creating. These were not large videos, but short, to-the-point videos that lasted less than 10 minutes or so. Once I could get a video to resolve, the output didn’t look very professional or clear, often having a ‘hazy’ quality to the video itself. Not that I needed to worry about that given that it’s frequent crashes made it all but impossible to use. In short, I found the versions prior to this 2011 version to be big disappointments. While my experience with the 2011 version is very short, it appears that Microsoft has placed renewed emphasis on this application and has made it light years better than its previous incarnations.
The general editing of video is very similar to the previous versions but the effects, transitions and integrations are mostly new. These new capabilities offer creative options to the basic video creator. While it won’t replace high-end video creation and editing software, the 2011 version is robust enough to allow the hobbyist to modify their videos in preparation for posting on-line. It does such a good job that I find myself wishing it would have come out about 6 months earlier so I could have avoided purchasing a $99 video editing software suite. While that suite is still more powerful than Movie Maker, it’s basic and mid-level features are matched by Movie Maker, and it’s a free download! Now THAT’s value!
While I will likely never use Microsoft Messenger (but I like it’s integration with Facebook and LinkedIn), Microsoft Mail or the Bing Bar (as Bing is already the start page in my browser), I really like the enhancements the Microsoft team has made to Live Writer and Movie Maker, two applications that I will no doubt begin to find myself increasingly using. Try them out for yourself and see what you think. I sure hope that someone writes a Vimeo plug-in for Live Writer soon that works as easily as the one provided to YouTube!
