LiveSide - News blog : Office Online

Office 2010 begins Technical Preview: Office Web Applications available through Windows Live at no cost

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:02:42 GMT

At the Worldwide Partners Conference in New Orleans today, Microsoft announced a “major milestone and Technical Preview” for Office 2010, with “tens of thousands” of beta invitations to the technical preview going out beginning today (just received ours this evening :) ). In addition, Microsoft announced three ways for users to access the new Office Web Applications, lightweight web based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote:

Office Web applications will be available in three ways: through Windows Live, where more than 400 million consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost; on-premises for all Office volume licensing customers including more than 90 million Office annuity customers; and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers will be able to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering.

No real word as of yet as to how Office Live Workspaces fits in to the equation, here’s what we got when we asked:

Office Live services will continue to be offered and evolve over time. As we announced last November, we will deliver the current Office Live services through Windows Live as our single consumer destination. We are excited that we will have the opportunity to expose great Office Live features such as online document sharing and collaboration to the more than 500 million Windows Live users.

While the news that Office Web applications will be available for on-premises hosting will likely be good news to corporations that are leery of giving up their data to Microsoft (or Google), we’re more interested in how Office Live will “evolve”, how well connected the rest of Windows Live will be into the new services (SkyDrive access?). The Technical Preview only contains the desktop versions of Office 2010, testing of the Office Web applications won’t happen until later this year.

Office In The Cloud

Sunshine — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:45:22 GMT

In all this excitement of PDC, cloud computing (Azure) and Live Mesh updates, there is one piece of cloud related news we haven’t told you about.

Microsoft Office will also be moving towards the cloud! We already know about the web storage of Office documents through Office Live Workspace (save, access, and share) but that is going to be expanded with lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Powered by AJAX and/or Silverlight, they will be available for use in standard Web browsers such ad Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Imagine being able to edit your Office document from your PC, Mobile Phone and the Web!

Click on the thumbnails for larger images

All this will be offered through Office Live, a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings. For business customers, Office Web applications will be offered as a hosted subscription service and through existing volume licensing agreements. Later on this will also be offered as a part of the Office Suites (Office 14). There will be a private technology preview of the Office Web applications later this year. If you are interested in this, sign up for Office Live Workspace. Of course we’ll keep you updated on this too!

For a first look video, head over to Channel 9.

PressPass - Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser
Workspace Team Blog - Microsoft extends Office to the browser via Office Live

Office Live to launch in November, Office Online relaunch coming soon too

Chris — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:55:00 GMT

Microsoft today announced, to a relatively large amount of fanfare, the release of Office Live on November 15th. The press release has all the facts, with Mary-Jo Foley providing some good analysis. The highlights are:

A change in the offerings, with a Premium level now being offered alongside Basic and Essentials
Increased storage across the packages, with upto 2GB of web storage available for Premium users
The inclusion of Microsoft Office Live adManager Beta, which works with Microsoft adCenter, to deliver and place subscribers’ keyword ads on Windows Live Search

Not content with merely regurgitating the press release, we've also learnt that Office Online is expected to be relaunched on November 13th, featuring advertising powered by MSN adCenter. With both Office Online and Office Live updating at the same time, the lack of web-based Office applications becomes even more apparent. With Ray Ozzie saying that they have no plans to launch a web-based Office suite "in the near future" we're looking at Office 14 to go some way in filling the void.