Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever -- if you're even remotely interested in technology news, you're going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.

To be honest, Windows and Office aren't always known for being the most cutting-edge platforms. But at Six Apart, we've got some very cool demos about ways that you can connect these decades-old platforms to the latest innovations in blogging. And you might be surprised to see that even some people who work at Microsoft are using these tools themselves.

Some background: A year ago, we showed off some cool ideas about blogging with Office at the MIX06 conference that Microsoft held in Las Vegas. (There's even video online -- just skip past the showgirl and the Elvis impersonator.) Now the technology demo we showed off last year is something that you can actually deploy.

You see, we're not gonna be happy until every company can have a blog. To get everybody using blogs at work, we have to connect with the tools people are already using. Some of that's already happened -- you can use Movable Type Enterprise with your Oracle database or build templates in Adobe's Dreamweaver. But the big Kahuna of office apps is Office. And Office 2007 is surprisingly good, so it makes it even more attractive to plug it in to the power of blogs.

Okay, enough talk. Let's see what blogging with MT Enterprise and Office 2007 looks like:

• Post to your Movable Type blog right from Microsoft Word. How well does this work? You're reading a post created in Word 2007 right now.

• Publish your Movable Type blog posts in Microsoft Word format. We've been talking about this idea for years, but imagine the potential ??“ if you've got a guy in your office who is afraid of blogs but just wants to get his information delivered on his desk in the format he's used to, now you can do that. What about just publishing each category archive as a Word document, so you can have a single file with all the information about that topic?
• Support for feeds in Outlook 2007. There are tons of things you can do with feeds that get more powerful in Outlook ??“ every tag has its own feed in MT Enterprise, and of course every blog does, too. But you can make feeds across all the blogs in your system, so you can do cool things like having every post tagged ???important??? go into a single folder in Outlook, where you can make a macro to turn them into to-dos.
• And lots more. There's all kinds of other opportunities with the new Microsoft platforms. OpenSearch support in IE7 lets you automatically perform searches of your intranet blogs right in your browser. XML-based formats for PowerPoint and Excel mean you can actually pull in live data from your blogs into presentations or spreadsheets. And we're sure the best stuff hasn't even been thought of yet.

More of this kind of integration is on the way; Movable Type Enterprise already integrates with platforms like Microsoft's SQL Server. But we wanted to make sure that, amidst all the other news of the day, nobody misses the fact that two of the most popular software platforms around are finally ready for business when it comes to blogs.

I’m here at a technology evangelism event today, and one of the speakers here is Jeremy Zawodny, a long-time Movable Type blogger, one of Yahoo’s most prominent faces in the blogosphere, and a pretty good judge of how to promote things using blogs.

We’ve long believed that, despite some people’s misgivings, corporate blogs don’t have to suck, and Jeremy echoes our sentiments, outlining some traits that make help make for great business blogs:

• there’s some personality in the writing
• they write about stuff that’s interesting to me (or they write it in an interesting way, and that gets my attention)
• they post frequently
• they write about stuff that’s not always blatantly self-promotional

So, which blogs epitomize those traits? According to Jeremy, two of the best are by Zillow and Garmin. One’s a real estate information service, and the other makes GPS gadgets, but what they share in common is their teams care enough to blog really well about the products they make. We’re happy they’re both powered by TypePad, but we’re even happier they both provide a great example of how to tell your company’s story using a blog.

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the original announcement of Movable Type 1.0.Within the first few hours of that post, hundreds of people had downloaded the software and started blogging. Today, tens of millions of people have posted with Movable Type, commented on MT-powered blogs, or read sites powered by Movable Type. In the past five years, we’ve released dozens of upgrades and introduced hundreds of new features, all while being supported and inspired by one of the most widely read, influential, and passionate communities on the web. We usually try to focus on the ways people use blogs, but today we wanted to take a moment to look back.

After our last Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar, we said all the feedback we collected was positive. We’re thrilled to report that last week’s event in New York City was an even bigger success. More attendees, more useful information and case studies covered, and equally positive feedback from those present is a great way to show that our entire community is really helping move business blogging forward.

Thanks again to Attensa for their participation and sponsorship of the event. And we were glad to have Professional Network members D.L. Byron of Textura Design and David Jacobs of Apperceptive, both of whom offered the great insights into the practical parts of deploying blogs in a corporation.

One of the most-requested resources which we didn’t have present in the information packets was a list of local Professional Network members who attended the event and were available to help the companies present make the most of blogs. So, we’re glad to share the 82kb PDF file listing profiles of Professional Network members who were there to help.

It’s not too late to attend one of our seminars — the Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar Registration form for our Los Angeles event is still open. Both our San Francisco and New York events filled to capacity, so register soon. You’ll be present for a good mix of topics: A broad overview of the ways your company can use blogs, insight into managing information overflow in an age of short attention spans, and then lots of real, practical experience from companies of all sizes that have deployed blogs.

Thanks again to everyone who joined us in New York, and we’ll see you in Los Angeles!