A Peek Inside Microsoft Office Web Apps

Ever since Google launched its online office productivity suite named Google Docs the IT industry was abuzz with rumors that Microsoft will follow suit soon. These two companies are often at loggerheads over issues like search engine and browser market share. After much speculation Microsoft launched the technical preview of its online Office productivity suite titled Office Web Apps in September this year. A technical Preview gives the target users a fair idea of what the final version would be like. It is the first attempt of Redmond based Microsoft to integrate its client based and online versions of Office suite.

Office Web Apps will be launched in 2010, probably in the first half. It will offer 4 applications to the users- Word, PowerPoint, One Note and Excel. According to Microsoft, Office Web Apps will work on Internet Explorer Version 7 onwards. Hence, those who are still using the problem ridden IE6 will need to upgrade their browser. Apart from IE 7 and 8, the application suite will also run on third party browsers like Firefox and Safari. Chrome is not among the supported browsers for obvious reasons. It works seamlessly on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. The users need to have Office 2003 or later installed on their machines.

Just like MS Office, the Office Web Apps is going to have different editions. The free Consumer version will have advertisements. It will be offered through Microsoft Skydrive which is a web based storage service. The business consumers may opt for the hosed version. It will not have any advertisements. The last of the lot is the enterprise edition. It is meant for corporate houses that have personal SharePoint servers.

The free version will allow a user to use up to 25GB of storage space for his documents. The look and feel of the Web apps is similar to that of the client based version of MS Office. Excel is the only Web App that allows multiple users to edit the same document simultaneously. However, the advanced formula and chart features of Excel are not there in the online version. Besides it supports editing only on the new .xlsx format. This is true also for Word and PowerPoint. While multi user editing on the same document is a boon for business users it also has a drawback. In this mode, Undo and Redo are disabled.

Word needs maximum improvement in the Web Apps section. As of now, the users can only view existing Word documents, they cannot create new documents. OneNote is still not a part of this suite but later Microsoft may choose to include it. However, integration between Office Web Apps and client version of MS office is inadequate and here Google Docs has a clear edge. The users of Office Web Apps will have to remember the latest version of a document and its location. Sharing documents is also confusing to an extent as the users can share folders but not individual documents. If these glitches are taken care of, Office Web Apps may just become as popular as its client based version.