I'm pleased to have discovered that Windows Live Writer can be used to compose messages in my newly established site support blog. I installed WordPress for this purpose and have managed to get it running properly after going through various new learning curves. These involved IIS6, MySQL and PHP as well as Wordpress. Often in the Windows community we find that open source software is not well supported for political reasons. As it turns out, both PHP and MySQL have been available for Windows for years and can be made to work well on it, although I found difficulty getting PHP 4 up and running, so I switched to 5. It's good to be able to get PHP working because there's lots of stuff out there that uses it. Wordpress took a little bit of effort and tweaking but now it's all working, and I will be able to use WLW to maintain it.
The first thing I looked at when an Intranet blog came up was Sharepoint, because WLW supports it, because we get the CALs bundled in free with our software deal, because it can do all these other wonderful things and because it can do a blog as well. But Sharepoint is vastly overblown for what we would use it for. You need specialised training to figure out how to set it up, let alone use it. After I tried installing it and failed, I figured it was just easy to remove it and look for a freeware blogging platform that I could install. Apart from Wordpress, there is an open source version of Moveable Type in development. Because it's not yet available I chose WP instead.
I've also found that Wordpress's RSS feed works with Windows Live Mail. Thus, I can pick up the articles in there. I may also look at setting up the RSS feeds on some staff PCs as well.
