As usual, Mary Jo Foley is right on top of all the latest from Microsoft, including Office Web Apps.
In her post on “Ten things to know”, she answers some of the more immediate questions on Office Web Apps, here’s some highlights:
- OWA is available to Office Technical Preview testers, but not all of them, at least not yet
(In order to access the OWA Technical Preview, you must have a Windows Live account (of course), but you must also have an Office document in a SkyDrive folder, or you won’t be offered access, even if you are in the program)
- This techical preview is far from complete. Editing is only available for Excel and PowerPoint, but you can view Word and OneNote docs, for example
- “What happens to Office Live Workspace? If you’re among the 10.5 million people Microsoft officials say are currently using Office Live Workspace, Microsoft’s collaboration service that was a pre-cursor to Office Web Apps, here’s what to expect: Office Live Workspace will be superseded by Office Web Apps. Workspace customers will be upgraded automatically to Office Web Apps and Microsoft is committing to provide migration information and assistance in migrating data once Web Apps are available.”
- OWA is accessible from Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, from IE, FireFox, or Safari for Mac. iPhone access seems to be a bit murkier.
(Also btw SkyDrive looks like it’s getting hammered right now, your access may be a bit slow)
Check out Mary Jo’s post for more on OWA. We’ll have more, too, soon of course.