Microsoft's Office Web Apps

[dhilipkumar]

Microsoft's Office Web Apps

   When it launches next year, Office Web Apps will consist of four applications: Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote. In the Technical Preview, many features are missing from the apps, and some are more fully developed than others. For example, in Word you can only view documents, while in Excel you can create spreadsheets, edit them and collaborate with other users. OneNote isn't available at all yet.

Even at launch there will still be some features missing. For example, only Excel and OneNote will allow co-authoring (letting multiple people collaborate on a document simultaneously). Neither Word nor PowerPoint will have those features at launch, although Microsoft says they will be added in the future.

Understanding the different versions

Just as there are different versions of Microsoft Office, there will be different versions of Office Web Apps:

The consumer version, which is what I tested, will be free, although "free" will come at a price when it comes to the user experience, because it will include advertisements. There are no ads yet, and so no way to know whether they will be disruptive or barely noticeable. As of now, Microsoft has no plans for releasing a for-pay consumer version of Office Web Apps that will allow you to dispense with the ads.

The consumer version is tied to Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft's free online storage service. That's where you'll store, create, edit and share your Office Web Apps documents. The service lets you designate certain folders as private and others as shareable with people you specify or with anyone.

The hosted version will be available to business customers who pay for hosted accounts on Microsoft Online Services, which is powered by SharePoint. No ads will be in the interface.
The corporate, in-house version is for enterprises with volume licenses for Microsoft Office and a SharePoint server. In this version, enterprises will host Office Web Apps on their own SharePoint server. No ads will be in the interface. Enterprises will not have to pay extra for this; it will be part of the volume license for Microsoft Office.

Most of the features of these three versions will be identical, although there will be some minor differences. Besides ads, the consumer version will include a feature that allows publishing to third-party blogs, Web sites and wikis, something that the other two versions won't allow. The other versions, though, will track document lifecycles, allow for backup and restore, and give IT staff control over how the application is deployed and used.

computerworld