14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has updated the Cloud version of Exchange Server enabling users to view Office documents right on the web.
Essentially, the Office Web App now integrates with Outlook Web App in Exchange Online, according to David Alexander and Kartik Murthy, from the Exchange team.
This means that customers using Exchange Online can now take advantage of the same range of capabilities when previewing Office docs as if they would be using the desktop Outlook client.
“We’re excited to announce an update to OWA in Exchange Online that now integrates the Office Web Apps into the attachment previewing experience for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files!” Alexander revealed.
OWA, or Outlook Web Access, sports WebReady Document Viewing since Exchange 2007, allowing a number of file formats sent as attachments to emails to be viewed as web pages.
This capability has now been expanded to support Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files for users of Exchange Online.
“Along with continued PDF support, this means Exchange Online users get high-fidelity previews of Office documents on the web, in exactly the same format they were created,” Alexander added.
“WebReady Document Viewing is perfect for quick document previews and if you need to edit a document you can easily open the file in your desktop Office client from the Office Web App through a single click.”
All that customers have to do is click on the “Open in browser” links that are added to Office document attachments in their messages.
WebReady Document Viewing lets “OWA users preview attached Microsoft Office documents and PDFs in a web browser without having to save them to disk or open them in a locally-installed application. We continued to offer this functionality in Exchange 2010, but we received a lot of feedback that text and formatting of Office documents were sometimes not the same as the original document when viewed in the desktop Office client applications,” Alexander explained.