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By admin, June 10, 2010

As promised by Microsoft Office team couple of weeks back, Office web apps are finally integrated into Skydrive cloud storage service and they are very much accessible by the users from now onwards.

Although Jason Moore, Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live SkyDrive has written on the official blog that the integrated service has been made available to US, UK, Canada and Ireland users at this point of time but it’s working absolutely fine for users belonging to any country as well. You may not get a language customized version of Office web apps for now but that’s also on the way, quotes Jason in the announcement post.

So from now on, you can start working on your office documents right through your web browser and start sharing your content across the web, no matter how large the shared file(s) may be. This is actually the biggest advantage of Skydrive integration with Office web apps as the files being shared are stored within your Skydrive account and whenever you share your files with someone else, the recipient gets to see the cloud hosted version of that file and therefore doesn’t even require a download to see the file. File size can therefore go upto 10 GB, which is enormously huge. This way, file download becomes an option, no more a compulsion to the users. Continue reading 'Office Web Apps go live on Skydrive. Soon to come on Hotmail !'»

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By admin, May 15, 2010

Microsoft has recently informed all its Office Live Workspace users via email notification that all the Office Live Workspace accounts will soon be upgraded for FREE. Microsoft Office Live Workspace will be integrated/merged with Windows Live Skydrive, thereby providing facility for every Windows Live Workspace user to store and share documents and photos with upto 25 GB of web space allocated for each account.

It won’t be just about document storage and sharing as the users will also be able to view, create and edit office documents, using newly introduced Office Web Apps. There is no fixed date announced by Microsoft regarding this account upgrade but it appears that the upgrade isn’t too far away.

Microsoft writes…

In the coming months, you’ll receive notification when your Office Live Workspace account will be upgraded, along with further details. Until then, there’s no need for you to do anything.

With this news from Microsoft, its pretty clear that Microsoft wants to provide the best experience and productivity gain to its users by clubbing the forces of Office Live Workspace, Windows Skydrive and Office Web Apps together and give least reasons to its users for making transition to other competing cloud based productivity services such as Google docs and Zoho docs.

Here’s the email in webpage format

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By admin, November 24, 2009

As Office Web Apps for Enterprise is yet to release for companies and enterprises, we have brought you an introductory article on installing and administering Office Web Apps. It will majorly be useful for IT administrators and Network managers, who are generally involved in administering SharePoint Server for their enterprises.

As Office Web Apps for Enterprises are supposed to be deployed on SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, lets us brief you a little about Office Web Apps first and things you should expect from it.

Office Web Apps are web analogues of desktop based Microsoft Office applications,  which serve the purpose of presenting Office documents through a internet browser window. Office web apps use standard internet languages and tools such as HTML, JavaScript and similar others to display the documents on web. Microsoft has made all relevant efforts in making Office Web apps compatible for every browser.

Now, as you’re clear about the basic Office Web Apps and their utility, you can go ahead with installing Office Web Apps on SharePoint Server 2010. It is noteworthy here that you need not install SharePoint Server 2010 and Office Web apps on different hardware. Office web apps work flawless when installed at the top of SharePoint Server 2010.

Without much ado, here’s the deployment guide you need for installing and administering Office Web Apps on your SharePoint Server 2010.

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By admin, October 7, 2009

Since the Tech preview launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps, the enthusiasm for Cloud based MS Office apps has been on ‘Cloud’ Nine. Tech pundits and bloggers have been thoroughly writing about their first hand experience with Office Web Apps, with both positive and negative things to point out.

Office Web Apps, as already explained earlier, are supposed to bring Office applications and related functionalities over the web, which would let end users do everything (create, edit, save, import, export, store, share…) with their Office documents on web, something which was earlier limited to desktop Office application suite only.

Office Web Apps also make it possible for multiple users to work simultaneously on a single document in real-time manner. This feature will supposedly enhance the productivity within enterprises.

As a whole, Office Web apps can be characterized with Customizable Sharing, Real-time collaboration and High Fidelity between Desktop and Web based document versions. Let’s dig a little deeper into it.

Customizable Sharing: Microsoft is using its native cloud storage service, SkyDrive to offer users, data storage facility on the cloud. After logging into your SkyDrive account, you get to see a “My Documents” folder as a default file storage location and an ability to create as many folders as you may want, for storing/categorizing your documents online. You can set the preferences for any folder, by making it shared publicly or within your network only.

In case you want to share a document with some of your friends/colleagues, you can do that via two ways: by mailing an invite link to access file to be shared or by publishing the document in the form of a webpage and sending it across.

Real Time Collaboration: MS Office Web Apps bring the best surprise in real-time simultaneous collaboration. With this feature, multiple users can co-edit Excel and OneNote documents online at the same time. While editing the same document, you can actually see edits being done by other users in real time. This will be a huge advantage for enterprises where such innovative collaborative features can greatly increase the productivity of teams working together.

Within this technical preview, we could only see Real-time Collaboration in Excel web app. OneNote will soon follow up but its better to keep your expectations low as real-time collaboration will only be limited to Excel and OneNote (a little disappointing though).

High Fidelity : MS Office team has taken special care in maintaining high fidelity of Office documents. After working on Office Web Apps, one might not even realize the difference in appearance, formatting and overall look of the documents opened in Office web app. Documents in Office web apps look no different than documents opened in your native office desktop application. This was actually necessary as end users are so habitual of the native Office interface that any new change in web  based Office versions could create transition problems.