14 DAY TRIAL // Working in the Cloud, as opposite to being anchored on a desktop or glued to a specific device, comes with inherent advantages that users only get to appreciate fully once they notice how their workflow evolves. Seamless collaboration and sharing, as well as everywhere access, are the three main benefits of having components of the Office productivity suite in the Cloud. Office Web Apps brings to the table inherent advantages over using the desktop or mobile flavors of Office 2010, and the Cloud-based extension of the productivity suite offered through Windows Live SkyDrive is sure to win the hearts and minds of Office users everywhere.
One of the complaints that I’ve heard time and again from users reluctant to embrace the Cloud is related to privacy. Customers are simply finding all of a sudden that they feel uncomfortable with having their content, documents, files, etc. uploaded online, stored in a remote data center, and in the hands of a third-party. But what few of them realize is that they are already, extensively putting their content, documents, files, etc. online.
According to Jason Moore, principal lead program manager Windows Live SkyDrive, no less than 350 million Office documents are sent in Hotmail messages on a monthly basis. How is this different than Office Web Apps via Windows Live SkyDrive? And the fact of the matter is that, each user uploading an Office document to Hotmail is in fact looking for the three inherent benefits of Office Web Apps, namely collaboration, sharing and access.
“When I share a document, sometimes I expect people to simply read over the file, other times I want them to edit the file and reply with their changes. Doing this over email is possible, but the more people you need to contribute, the more challenging it becomes to keep all the versions straight,” Moore stated. “With Office 2010, Office Web Apps, and SkyDrive, I no longer have nightmares about having to manually recombine documents: I know everyone can safely and securely update the same version of the file, conveniently stored in my SkyDrive.”
Office Web Apps in SkyDrive has been available for testing for the past eight months. The Cloud-based Office 2010 components continue to be in Technical Preview stage, but with the evolution of Windows Live SkyDrive to Wave 4, Office Web Apps are likely to be finalized as well. The hosted version of Office Web Apps, available for business customers to deploy in their organizations, was released to manufacturing concomitantly with the rest of Office 2010.
“You told us that you wished these services respected the formatting of the documents you already have, that they lack key features that are important to you, and that trying to work on the same document with both Office and these services is just too hard and unreliable,” Moore explained. “You also told us that these services force you to learn a completely new way of working with your files when all you really wanted was a service that improves the way you already work. Every feature we’ve built was created with that in mind.”
Moore revealed that no less than 90% of the office 2010 Beta testers that also tried Office Web Apps indicated that accessing and editing documents from anywhere was at the moment easier than ever. Fact is that Office Web Apps allows not only you, but also anyone you want, to access your documents, to edit them and to save them back online. No more back and forth emails with Office docs attached, no more working to synchronize details across various files, no more going through USB sticks to find the one document that you misplaced.
“We’ve spent a lot of time making sure SkyDrive makes the things you already do today even better. We know that the primary way people collaborate on documents is via email, and we’ve thought a lot about how to make that experience better and more fluid. Plus, with the powerful integration of SkyDrive into Office 2010, we worked hard to ensure that you can work on your SkyDrive documents just as if they were on your hard disk,” Moore said. “Most importantly, no matter how you choose to work with your documents, you know your files won’t lose their formatting as you go from Office to the Web Apps to email and back.”