|
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 00:00 |
|
 Everyone's waiting with bated breath for the release of Office Web Applications, Microsoft's soon to be released web versions of its massively popular MS Office productivity software, and Microsoft's answer to online suites like Google Docs. Much of what Office Web Applications will be like is shrouded in mystery, with speculations running rampant. There was a false alarm of MS supposedly offering a technical preview of this new application at its recent annual Partner Conference, but it was found that the technical preview applied online to Office 2010, the latest version of Microsoft's on premise Office suite.
It is expected that Office Web Apps will be a stripped down version of MS Office, yet a lot more powerful than Google Apps, and hence more enticing to people used to MS Office. Microsoft has said that the applications will be made available in three ways: free through Windows Live, free to Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance to run as a service inside their firewalls, and for a fee via Microsoft Online Services in the same hosted manner that Exchange and SharePoint are delivered. Office Web Applications will be delivered as part of the software in the second half of 2010. Microsoft isn't planning a private beta test of Office Web Applications until August. I would be interested to see how Office Web Apps integrate with third party online collaboration software like HyperOffice, which have traditionally worked well with MS Office. Apart from online access, Office applications require a collaboration context around them, which includes online document storage, organization, permissions, and related collaboration tools like discussions, workspaces etc. Google Apps serves this role around Google Docs. It would be itneresting to see if Microsoft allows integration with third party software, or ties users to its own collaboration platform, SharePoint.
|
