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.