James Bannan30 October 2008, 3:52 PM
Microsoft has unveiled its next-generation Office. Version 14 will have web-based versions too, in a clear move to tackle Google Docs.
At its Los Angeles Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft has announced that the next version of the Office productivity suite will include web applications – lightweight versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote which will allow users to access their documents and collaborate with other users via a web browser.
Simultaneous collaboration — where users can work on the same document at once — has been one of the weakest points of Office in the past, and one area where Google has created a point of differentiation in its Google Docs suite.
Microsoft hasn't yet provided in-depth coverage of the new Office suite – that is still to come — but it has given a demonstration of how Office is being moulded to fit Microsoft’s ongoing vision of software plus services – client apps integrating as seamlessly as possible with cloud apps.
The Office web applications will be viewable from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, with the aim of producing a seamless experience between all the browsers. The web apps have been optimised for Microsoft Silverlight, however, and will work better when used with this plugin (not, perhaps, as insidiously evil as the stuff Microsoft builds that "works best with Internet Explorer" — at least Silverlight is cross-browser, and available for Mac and PC.)
Using Office web apps, users can open the same documents from different locations without the usual warnings about file locks and being forced into read-only mode. Changes made on one document are quickly replicated on the other, and the small-scale changes we saw made during the presentation only took a second or two to propagate. How the system will cope with large-scale document changes remains to be seen. The system has been designed so that there is no degradation of data or formatting between the client and browser, so there is no bias pushing users back to the Office application.
Above: a Word doc in the web version of Word. (Note to Redmond: the "Keys to ongoing sucess" may be to get the spellchecker working in the web version, too...)
Leveraging off the online nature of Office 14, users now have an online presence and can quickly establish communication via email, phone or messaging services while collaborating. Documents are accessed via an Office Live Workspace which will eventually be set up to synchronize with Microsoft Live Mesh.
Of course, the concept of productivity applications running in the cloud isn’t a new one – Google Apps have been around for quite some time in this space. However, while Google's growth has been slow and largely based on word-of-mouth recommendation, Microsoft has a huge head start in its presence on hundreds of millions of desktop PCs already, along with its Live suite of applications and services to create a fully integrated user experience, which is something Google can’t really match.
However, one caveat is that no details were announced about hosting these services – whether it’s something Microsoft is going to handle which customers then pay for, or whether customers can host these services themselves (by purchasing more products, presumably). If there’s an associated cost which is deemed to be too high (just being there is too high for some people), then Google Apps might not be left out in the cold fringes of cloud computing just yet.
No details were given as to the release date of Office 14. We’ll post this information when it becomes available.
To read an interview with Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Caposella about Office 14’s browser integration, along with some screenshots of it in action, click here.
Above: OneNote running in Internet Explorer.