Vista - Microsoft to ‘webify’ Office (sort of)

Written by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:09 am October 28th, 2008



Microsoft is finally doing what many have been clamoring for — making Web-based versions of its Office apps available — but in a different way than expected.

As part of the Office 14 release wave, Microsoft is going to provide“Office Web applications,” which it is describing as “lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These versions will allow users to access their documents via a Web browser on the PC, phone or other devices.

Microsoft is slated to make the announcement about its Office Web applications plans at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles on October 28 during the morning keynote.



Read more at the Source:
Microsoft to ‘webify’ Office (sort of) | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

They will prolly use it promote all the other internet services that they've been trying to get a foot in.

I'd be surprised if it works just as well in other browsers than IE too. Or at least, features will lag on other browsers as they catch up to the "Microsoft standards"! lol Good strategy move. I would guess that this can take advantage of a lot of the WPF foundation introduced with Vista which can make it decent (for a web app).

I wonder what kind of integration they are going to include with IIS Server. Maybe in either a patch or a new version. That'd piss off the other competitors. heh

This is going to be great. Especially since Outlook Web Access is such an important tool for businesses. The idea of having it on the web makes me wonder if remote connections will be less needed for people to work on their .doc from home heh.

I thought you can already do this kind of stuff with Sharepoint Server...well, at least if your company has one.

I think most of what they are trying to do is make it a "public storage of documents" where you can share your stuff with various people on the internet.

ala google

I just looked at the Office Live Demo Video.

Yeah...as I suspected. Pretty much SharePoint Server on the internet.

I think it's all a move towards Cloud computing that Microsoft is starting to promote.

Yeah it might be an interesting time ahead. I visited this booth of this new company that does data storage in "the cloud". They use technology developed by the government where "pieces" of data is stored across many servers to secure it's content in addition to the encryption. Furthermore, only a few random servers need to have their pieces for you to reconstruct the data in case some are inaccessible (prolly thinking nuclear blast originally). I guess something like this would make companies more prone to trust their data in "other people's hands" as well as reduce their own data center costs.