MS Office 2007 Beta : First Impressions

I am running it like everyone else in the world with an MSDN license. So to add to
the white noise I will drop a few impressions into the ether.

RSS

Outlook has very cool reader capabilities: Awesome, in fact. I have been an avowed
user of News Gator for years and as I suspected, I just uninstalled it because MS
has decided to build in News Gator’s Outlook Reader functionality into Outlook 2007.

In addition, although there isn’t support for dasBlog in the initial Beta, there is
posting support in MS Word. With as much time and energy as I have put in to finding
and being frustrated with different posting utilities, this is a welcome feature.
I hope MS gets it right.

Visio

One little interesting nugget buried inside the Visio beta is the “Brain Storming”
template, which is really a poorly executed mind map template. Frankly, I am a bit
surprised that MS hasn’t acquired MindJet by now and included Mind Manager as part
of the MS Office suite. If this Visio template is their attempt to compete with a
genuine mind mapping application, they have failed.