Web-Based Office Planned

Web server-based versions of major Office applications will be available with the next version of Microsoft’s suite, which is code-named Office 14. Specifically, Web server versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, likely provided by SharePoint servers, will enable browser users to edit and view shared documents. The new applications could help hold off the threat of Web-based Office competitors and might provide viable alternatives to the full suite for some users, but Microsoft will probably carefully limit the capabilities of the Web applications to protect the suite.

Online Document Editing from Browsers

Demonstrated at the Oct. 2008 Professional Developers Conference, the Office Web applications will enable groups of browser users to concurrently edit and view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents stored on a Web server, either internal or Microsoft-hosted. Users will have basic editing, formatting, and search capabilities that correspond roughly to the “Home” tab of the corresponding Office 2007 application Ribbons. The applications employ Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 cross-browser development platform and will probably work with browsers and OSs that Silverlight supports; Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows were demonstrated at the conference.