Microsoft announces Office web applications

Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 has kicked off at New Orleans and Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 has finally reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A number of new features have been announced and showcased in the event. PowerPoint is getting video and image editing capabilities, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote are getting a new feature called as co-author, using which more than one user can edit the same document simultaneously in real time, Microsoft Backstage for easy document preparation, a new feature called Sparklines for Excel are the few among the many great useful features announced in the event. Microsoft has promised that the final product will land on the second half of 2010 while the public preview is expected to arrive this year. For those who can't wait, the preview version is already available on all major torrent trackers.

While the new features of Office 2010 was nothing mind blowing, what was really interesting was the announcement of Office Web applications. Microsoft made it clear that Office Web applications will work smoothly on various browsers including Firefox and Safari, however Chrome is still not supported possibly due to the Silverlight dependency of the proposed web applications. Whats more shocking is, the entire range of Office Web applications will be available to all Live subscribers at free of cost. That's a direct competition against Google's free online Docs suite launched almost three years ago. It should be noted that the web version of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be light weight versions of the original software which means that there will be some limitations. Microsoft has promised that the same look and feel of the documents will be preserved regardless of the browser of choice for both PCs and mobile phones.

Though the new web based applications might affect the revenue generated by desktop version of the Office suite, analysts believe that the move is really smart from Microsoft as this means that customers will continue using Microsoft products, which might be profitable in the long run. Google announced their plans for a new OS just last week and now Microsoft has fired back with their web applications. With the same familiar user interface now on the browser, combined with a range of new features just announced, Microsoft's Office Web applications might become a serious threat to the Google's Docs. But we can't draw into any conclusion until the service is launched next year. Until then, both Microsoft and Google have plenty of time to tweak and refine their products to prove one's superiority over the other. Hit on the read link for the official page for the preview of the new versions of your tried and trusted Office applications.

Read - Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview