This week has seen a record level of activity in terms of fixing bugs for Office 2.0. First, the first backup service for blogs has been released. Second, AdventNet unveiled a really cool QA tool for online applications. Third, Charlie Wood responded to my request for iCal event publishing from Salesforce.com by adding support for it in the excellent Spanning Salesforce.

Last January, I explained how I am using various services to backup my data, but my attempt at retrofitting my old TypePad account in order to backup my blogs powered by WordPress did not go very far. Since then, I dropped the ball and have been waiting for a better solution. The answer came this week with the release of BackupMyBlog. It only works with blogs powered by PHP 4.3.0 or later and a MySQL database, but as Brian Benzinger indicated in his excellent review, it should not be a problem for WordPress users. I hope that Doug Martin, developer of BackupMyBlog and the LookLater bookmarking tool, will come up with a more universal solution down the road. This service does not address the need for a standard backup API, but it provides a good temporary fix nonetheless.

Later this week, AdventNet — the company behind Zoho — released a preview for QEngine, a QA tool for online applications. QEngine is a toolbar that works with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox and supports remote record/playback of user actions, one-click access to test scripts, and a single point of control for functional and performance testing. This great online application does not solve any Office 2.0 bug in particular, but it should help a lot of Office 2.0 developers fix their own bugs before end-users catch them.

Finally, in what could be the very best example of ultimate customer support, Charlie Wood added a .ics feed (aka iCal) to the Spanning Salesforce collection of feeds for Salesforce.com less that a week after I asked for it. This means that any calendaring application that supports the .ics format can now be fed by event feeds from Salesforce.com. This includes Apple iCal and Google Calendar.

Now, don’t get too excited too fast, for one problem remains to be solved: for obvious security reasons, feeds provided by Spanning Salesforce are not public and are password protected. So far, Google Calendar only supports public calendars, therefore cannot be fed directly by Spanning Salesforce. I can see two ways of fixing this problem: one would consist in using an other online calendar as a gateway between Spanning Salesforce and Google Calendar, but I do not know any that supports password-protected .ics feeds. Another was recently suggested by Paul Brown as a comment to this post and consists in using an HTTP POST interface to Google Calendar in order to feed it with a .ics file. This solution would require a server-side deamon working in batch mode that would fetch the .ics file from Spanning Salesforce at regular intervals and feed Google Calendar. After further review, I tend to like this solution better, for it would not require the use of two online calendars and could be used as a way to filter some events, but it will require some custom development. If you’re interested to work on this mashup with me, drop me an email.

Overall, a very good week for Office 2.0…