I’ll be trying out Microsoft’s new suite of applications this week. The Expression Suite contains a couple of pieces that interest me. First is Expression Media, which is the rebranded successor to iView Media Pro. We use iView in a couple of offices to manage collections of images and to associate metadata with those images. In one case, we have many people using the free iView Catalog Reader to view a collection of shared images to use on their web pages. I need to make sure that Expression Media does a few things. It has to keep the same standards-based set of metadata that we are already using and it needs to seamlessly import both images and metadata. I expect those requirements won’t be a problem. I also hope that the user interface isn’t substantially different and that Mac support will be robust and long lived. I’m not so sure about those two.

I’m also interested in the Expression Web product. This is the replacement for Frontpage, which was never that great without Frontpage Extensions enabled on a webserver anyway. I’d like it to be template-based, and extremely easy for basic functions but contain more sophisticated functions for advanced users. I want to get away from using Composer (as part of the Mozilla or Seamonkey suites) since that tool hasn’t been substantially updated for years. I like Apple’s iWeb, but it lacks PC support and doesn’t allow for site-wide template changes. It also doesn’t allow you to save your own page templates.

Check back for more posts as I review these apps!