At the Professional Developers Conference 2008, it was revealed that Microsoft Office 14 for the web will run on operating systems other than Windows. This, of course, includes the Mac and Linux based operating systems.
Although precise details of how cross platform functionality will be achieved, this is a principal goal of the new Office 14 Web applications.
Demonstrations had previously been given using Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows 7 machines. However, the demo used documents and spreadsheets stored on Office Live Workspace - a service not available to users of Office 2008 on the Mac. Although a plugin to enable Mac support is reportedly under development, the tool is not yet supported.
Confusion abounds as spokesperson Scott Massey states that the current beta of Office Live Workspace is “currently accessible on a Mac via Firefox.” The experience for Mac users isn’t identical to that for Windows users, though “Mac users can work with Office Live Workspace as a file store today,” he said.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Microsoft Office 14 For The Web
In this video Antoine Leblond, Senior Vice President of the Office Productivity Applications Group, talks about Microsoft Office 14 for the web. Says Leblond, these versions of Office 14 are lightweight, cross platform, cross browser web based versions of Word, Powerpoint, Excel and OneNote. They are designed to give users access to their Office applications when they are away from their desktop and only have access to a browser.
Leblond also spoke of the ability to use Office Mobile on your mobile phone to access your Office documents, and the ability to work seamlessly between those three different platforms. There is a limited technical preview scheduled to be available by the end of the year.
Office 14 for the web will allow bloggers to do things like add Powerpoint presentations to their blogs. For consumer customers, users of the Office Live service will be able to get Office for the web. Business customers will be able to take advantage of a hosted subscription service or via volume licensing on their Sharepoint servers.
Office For The Web Demonstration
Later on in the video, Leblond is joined by Chris Bryant, Group Product Manager. In their ‘real world’ example, they showed OneNote allowing them to work collabroratively with one user using the rich office client in the office, one user using a laptop and another using OneNote mobile on their mobile phone. Users of any one of those devices could access the same document. The demonstration went as follow:
Antoine made a change to a document ‘at work’ using his rich client version of OneNote
Antoine’s change updated Chris’s laptop immediately so he was looking at the most up to date version of the document. Changes to the document get pushed out automatically to everone who is connected to it.
The update process also worked in the opposite direction as a change Chris made was transfererd to Antoine’s rich client
Office 14 Allows Multiple Concurrent Users
A combination of Ajax and Silverlight is used to facilitate Office 14 for the web. One giant leap forward in the new versions of the Office applications is the technology that allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously. The current locking process prevents two users from opening the same document for update simultaneously. This means that you could be working on a paragraph at the top of a document while a colleague works on a paragraph at the bottom of the same document. The document will be updated with all changes.
Leblond also spoke of the ability to use Office Mobile on your mobile phone to access your Office documents, and the ability to work seamlessly between those three different platforms. There is a limited technical preview scheduled to be available by the end of the year.
Office 14 for the web will allow bloggers to do things like add Powerpoint presentations to their blogs. For consumer customers, users of the Office Live service will be able to get Office for the web. Business customers will be able to take advantage of a hosted subscription service or via volume licensing on their Sharepoint servers.
Office For The Web Demonstration
Later on in the video, Leblond is joined by Chris Bryant, Group Product Manager. In their ‘real world’ example, they showed OneNote allowing them to work collabroratively with one user using the rich office client in the office, one user using a laptop and another using OneNote mobile on their mobile phone. Users of any one of those devices could access the same document. The demonstration went as follow:
Antoine made a change to a document ‘at work’ using his rich client version of OneNote
Antoine’s change updated Chris’s laptop immediately so he was looking at the most up to date version of the document. Changes to the document get pushed out automatically to everone who is connected to it.
The update process also worked in the opposite direction as a change Chris made was transfererd to Antoine’s rich client
Office 14 Allows Multiple Concurrent Users
A combination of Ajax and Silverlight is used to facilitate Office 14 for the web. One giant leap forward in the new versions of the Office applications is the technology that allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously. The current locking process prevents two users from opening the same document for update simultaneously. This means that you could be working on a paragraph at the top of a document while a colleague works on a paragraph at the bottom of the same document. The document will be updated with all changes.
'Office 14' to Be More Web-Friendly, Gates Says
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked publicly for the first time today about the next big Office release, code-named Office 14, which he said will give users new ways to access their applications online.
Microsoft won't provide the full functionality of Office online, but it will offer limited capabilities to view and edit the data in Office applications. It already does this for its Outlook e-mail client with a product called Outlook Web Access, and it will offer similar capabilities for other applications in Office 14, Gates said in a speech at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, California.
"Outlook Web Access is not the full version of Office, but if you want to go into a kiosk or an Internet cafe and browse and connect, it gives you plenty of functionality," he said. "As we look at all the modules [in Office 14] we have in mind the equivalent of Outlook Web Access," Gates said.
Code Name Confirmation
It was the first time Microsoft had confirmed the "Office 14" moniker for the next release, although the Windows enthusiast Web site AeroXperience reported that fact recently, citing an internal Microsoft document. It also reported that a beta of Office 14 would appear this year, with commercial release planned for 2009.
Gates offered no time line Monday and addressed Office 14 only briefly at the end of his speech, which focused on how developers can extend the current version of Office. He was answering a question from a developer in the audience who asked when Microsoft would provide full online access for Office in the same way Google does for its Google Apps service.
"There are lots of ways I can get to your Office data, but nothing compares to Google," the developer said.
Google App-Like Features in Office 14
Google Apps is used mostly by smaller businesses today, but it is seen as a potential competitor to Office despite having more limited functionality. Microsoft, which makes much of its profits from its Office desktop software, has been criticized for moving too slowly in getting the applications online.
It will take another step in that direction with Office 14, by offering Outlook Web Access equivalents of other Office applications such as Excel. "If you look at spreadsheets, maybe you'll not be able to set up all the data models [online], but you'll be able to read documents, change a few assumptions and try things out," Gates said.
Outlook Web Access is a part of Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 software, and it was unclear how the other Office 14 applications would be packaged and delivered. Gates did say that SharePoint Server, which is becoming more closely aligned with Office, "will be able to render a greater set of Office documents in an HTML environment."
Source: PC World
Microsoft won't provide the full functionality of Office online, but it will offer limited capabilities to view and edit the data in Office applications. It already does this for its Outlook e-mail client with a product called Outlook Web Access, and it will offer similar capabilities for other applications in Office 14, Gates said in a speech at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, California.
"Outlook Web Access is not the full version of Office, but if you want to go into a kiosk or an Internet cafe and browse and connect, it gives you plenty of functionality," he said. "As we look at all the modules [in Office 14] we have in mind the equivalent of Outlook Web Access," Gates said.
Code Name Confirmation
It was the first time Microsoft had confirmed the "Office 14" moniker for the next release, although the Windows enthusiast Web site AeroXperience reported that fact recently, citing an internal Microsoft document. It also reported that a beta of Office 14 would appear this year, with commercial release planned for 2009.
Gates offered no time line Monday and addressed Office 14 only briefly at the end of his speech, which focused on how developers can extend the current version of Office. He was answering a question from a developer in the audience who asked when Microsoft would provide full online access for Office in the same way Google does for its Google Apps service.
"There are lots of ways I can get to your Office data, but nothing compares to Google," the developer said.
Google App-Like Features in Office 14
Google Apps is used mostly by smaller businesses today, but it is seen as a potential competitor to Office despite having more limited functionality. Microsoft, which makes much of its profits from its Office desktop software, has been criticized for moving too slowly in getting the applications online.
It will take another step in that direction with Office 14, by offering Outlook Web Access equivalents of other Office applications such as Excel. "If you look at spreadsheets, maybe you'll not be able to set up all the data models [online], but you'll be able to read documents, change a few assumptions and try things out," Gates said.
Outlook Web Access is a part of Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 software, and it was unclear how the other Office 14 applications would be packaged and delivered. Gates did say that SharePoint Server, which is becoming more closely aligned with Office, "will be able to render a greater set of Office documents in an HTML environment."
Source: PC World
Office 14 ? Latest version of Microsoft® Office slated for early 2009
Multiple sources, including Microsoft itself, have confirmed the next version of Office is currently designated Office 14 – interestingly, the next designation was to be Office 13, but Microsoft determined that Office 13 could be “construed as unlucky…” (You couldn’t make this stuff up folks).
The focus of the new suite is to create productivity tools that are more role-based in nature as well as “baking in” the web-collaboration pieces already apparent in MOSS 2007.
The thought is that the applications will be more web-based, ala Google-docs, however Microsoft is beta testing an adjunct to Office (and non-Microsoft office suites) known as Office Live Workspace, which adds document collaboration/sharing capabilities to Word, Excel and PowerPoint (the XP, 2003 and 2007 releases), but Workspace doesn’t provide online/offline sync for Access, OneNote, Publisher or other more business-targeted members of the Office product family… not yet anyway. Stay tuned.
Source: Spring House
The focus of the new suite is to create productivity tools that are more role-based in nature as well as “baking in” the web-collaboration pieces already apparent in MOSS 2007.
The thought is that the applications will be more web-based, ala Google-docs, however Microsoft is beta testing an adjunct to Office (and non-Microsoft office suites) known as Office Live Workspace, which adds document collaboration/sharing capabilities to Word, Excel and PowerPoint (the XP, 2003 and 2007 releases), but Workspace doesn’t provide online/offline sync for Access, OneNote, Publisher or other more business-targeted members of the Office product family… not yet anyway. Stay tuned.
Source: Spring House
Office 14: Think first half of 2009
Office 14, the follow-on to Office 2007, is due out in the first half of calendar year 2009, according to a slide deck allegedly from Microsoft, posted on the AeroXperience blog.
The timeline states that the first beta of Office 14 is due out in the first half of calendar 2008. The second beta is slated for the second haalf of 2008. This year, the plan is to "lock" certain "key innovation areas," the timeline states.
The information on the next version of Office comes at a time when Microsoft is attempting to quell "speculation" about the due dates and feature sets for the post-Vista and post-Office 2007 versions of its flagship products. Microsoft began selling Windows Vista and Office 2007 through all channels on January 31, 2007.
Microsoft is focusing on a handful of "investigation areas" in planning the next version of its Office client, server and services products, according to the posting on AeroXperience. These include individual productivity; communication and collaboration, enterprise content management, business process and business intelligence, Office as a development platform, and manageability and security.
What does that mean, in terms of potential tangible deliverables? If Microsoft delivers on some of its initial goals, Office 14 may:
* Enable users to perform more complex tasks more easily (more Ribbon user interfaces for more Office apps, would be my guess as what this means)
* Provide more self- and community-based help options
* Deliver improved search relevancy
* Include tighter integration of unified communications, unified identity, and unified policy/compliance/support across all apps and for all devices
* Focus on "flexible storage solutions for digital asset management"
* "Bring BI (business intelligence) to the business process itself, as opposed to having it as an isolated as-needed activity"
* More tightly integrate declarative programming and improved Business Data Catalogue capabilities into the core Office development platform
* Provide tools to make global deployments easier, with new "federated, offline and virtualized models"
* Improve SharePoint's offline capabilities.
Source: Zd Net
The timeline states that the first beta of Office 14 is due out in the first half of calendar 2008. The second beta is slated for the second haalf of 2008. This year, the plan is to "lock" certain "key innovation areas," the timeline states.
The information on the next version of Office comes at a time when Microsoft is attempting to quell "speculation" about the due dates and feature sets for the post-Vista and post-Office 2007 versions of its flagship products. Microsoft began selling Windows Vista and Office 2007 through all channels on January 31, 2007.
Microsoft is focusing on a handful of "investigation areas" in planning the next version of its Office client, server and services products, according to the posting on AeroXperience. These include individual productivity; communication and collaboration, enterprise content management, business process and business intelligence, Office as a development platform, and manageability and security.
What does that mean, in terms of potential tangible deliverables? If Microsoft delivers on some of its initial goals, Office 14 may:
* Enable users to perform more complex tasks more easily (more Ribbon user interfaces for more Office apps, would be my guess as what this means)
* Provide more self- and community-based help options
* Deliver improved search relevancy
* Include tighter integration of unified communications, unified identity, and unified policy/compliance/support across all apps and for all devices
* Focus on "flexible storage solutions for digital asset management"
* "Bring BI (business intelligence) to the business process itself, as opposed to having it as an isolated as-needed activity"
* More tightly integrate declarative programming and improved Business Data Catalogue capabilities into the core Office development platform
* Provide tools to make global deployments easier, with new "federated, offline and virtualized models"
* Improve SharePoint's offline capabilities.
Source: Zd Net
Microsoft Office 14
Microsoft will unveil details about its next office productivity offering, Office 14. Among other things, the Office 14 wave of products will include the oft-rumored Web versions of certain Office applications, giving customers a way to both view and edit rich Office documents in the Web. For this first version of Office Web Applications--which may or may not be the final name--Microsoft is providing Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
"These are lightweight versions of the applications from the desktop product," Microsoft Office general manager Takeshi Numoto told me in a recent briefing. "They allow you to view, edit, and collaborate on Office docs in the browser."
The Office Web Applications will be distributed via Office Live, like Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Microsoft isn't yet discussing how or if they're going to charge for the Web Applications, but Numoto reminded me that the current offerings provide ad supported and subscription models, while businesses can actual host on-site. Expect more information down the road.
If you're interested in getting on the Office Web Applications beta, sign up for Office Live Workspace. Microsoft tells me that it will allow any Workspace customers to access the tech preview when it becomes available later this calendar year. Here are some screenshots of the experience.
"These are lightweight versions of the applications from the desktop product," Microsoft Office general manager Takeshi Numoto told me in a recent briefing. "They allow you to view, edit, and collaborate on Office docs in the browser."
The Office Web Applications will be distributed via Office Live, like Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Microsoft isn't yet discussing how or if they're going to charge for the Web Applications, but Numoto reminded me that the current offerings provide ad supported and subscription models, while businesses can actual host on-site. Expect more information down the road.
If you're interested in getting on the Office Web Applications beta, sign up for Office Live Workspace. Microsoft tells me that it will allow any Workspace customers to access the tech preview when it becomes available later this calendar year. Here are some screenshots of the experience.
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