Something I've been meaning to check out for a while now and finally had some time this morning is the new Office Live services. Turns out, there are three services that you can sign-up for which provide you with public facing and private MOSS 2007 sites:

• Office Live Basics    - Free
• Office Live Essentials    - $19.95/month
• Office Live Premium    - $39.95/month

I went ahead and got my own Office Live Basics site and have just started checking it out. There are a lot of great things that a developer like myself can have fun doing with this site…. And it'll be good knowledge to have and be able to talk to with customers. I'll probably blog more about this in the future, but here are a couple of URLs that may be of interest to you:

• Office Live Signup Page: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/default.aspx
• My Office Live Basics Site (I haven't done anything to it yet): http://temp.theyoungescom.officelive.com/default.aspx
• Innovate on Microsoft Office Live site: http://innovateonmicrosoftofficelive.com/
  • Training Modules: http://innovateonmicrosoftofficelive.com/TrainingModules.aspx
  • Office Live Developers Guide: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa751764.aspx
  • Office Live Developer Portal: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905514.aspx
  • Office Live Developer Forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=1064&siteid=1

Well… it's been about 9 months since I blogged last… not that anyone has noticed, and I thought I'd try to get back into it. The first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to Blog from Word 2007 and include pictures. Well… it took me about an hour and $25, but now its working great. Here's proof:

I didn't do a tremendous amount of research, so there may be cheaper/free ways of doing it, but here's what I did…

• Connected my Word Blogger to my spaces account. Note, when it asks for your "Space Name", enter just the name part of your space, not the entire URL. The Secret word is something that I was able to setup by going to spaces.live.com and editing my account

• Clicking Picture Options gave me the following screen, and the help links weren't of much help, though they did point me to Photobucket. After going to www.photobucket.com and creating an account, I found that in order to upload images via FTP, I had to subscribe to the Pro service. It was only $25 for a year, so instead of spending my time looking for a free service, I went ahead and upgraded to pro. Once I did this, and read the FTP guide Photobucket provided, I was able to get the Upload and Source URLs figured out and entered in (NOTE: the xxxxxxx in the upload URL is where your password would go).

• That was it!

So, now I'll click on the button in the upper left hand corner of Word and the images in this Blog Post will be FTP'd to Photobucket and the content should go right up to my Spaces blog. Let's give it a try…