Microsoft are dominating IT news this week with some major announcements at PDC. One of the largest is their confirmation they will bring versions of their Office products online. While Google made the move online first, creating Google Docs, the features for the most part have remained the same, extremely limited feature set, they launched with.
Well Microsoft has responded, and in a big way. They will offer an online version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note, while stripped down from the desktop feature set, they still appear to offer significantly superior functionality over the competition (Google).
A screen shot of Microsoft Word as a web apps.
Google Docs very limited functionality.
Retaining the widely acclaimed ribbon interface from Office 2007, the online suite will support reading, creating, editing, sharing and collaboration of documents using IE, Firefox and Safari browsers. One would assume that this would save out to desktop file formats (eg. .docx) if desired.
Office Web Applications are built using ASP.NET and Silverlight, so expect to download Silverlight if you haven’t already.
While being able to work on documents in the cloud is great, just how much file storage for our Office Online documents, still needs to be confirmed.
More info @ Microsoft
