Random Rants & Raves

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

Tags: pdc, office, beta
Categories: Office | Internet | SilverLight

If you've ever used the Google "office" applications - Google Spreadsheet, Google Docs, etc., you'd have known that saving and using files over the Internet has it's advantages. However, the Google office has some stuff that you can't really do - and that is work with your documents offline and having richer edit capabilities. Imagine being stuck in a long flight without having the documents you need with you on your notebook or a time when you need to create a richer document - with maybe a fancy table of contents, cover page etc.

This is where MS Office really shines. You get extremely rich editing capabilities within it. To those who call Office "Bloatware" and say that 90% of the users use only 10% of the features that Word, Excel and PowerPoint have, all I have to say to them is this: if you ever reach that time when you want more than that standard 10% you use, you'll be extremely glad to find that Office already has it and can ease your burden of doing it considerably.

You can now get the best of both worlds by signing up into the Office Live Workspace for free. It allows you to store, view and edit documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) as well as share and collaborate with others. You can also create lists like Tasks, Contacts, and Events here and store them in specific workspaces. If you've never used SharePoint earlier, this is a good first step to seeing the stuff you can do.

The best part is that the site can get fully integrated with your Office product by simply installing the Office Live Add-in available on the site. (Note: If you're on Vista, you also need to install this update and reboot before using the add-in). Once ready, you can save and open files directly from the Live workspace from within the Office applications. This also gives you offline capability to allow you to work with the documents when not connected to the Internet and then syncing them back to the workspace when you are connected.

There are only two small downsides to this stuff:

1. If you've already worked with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), you'll find that a lot of features are missing from this hosted version. This is however a good thing so as not to confuse or frighten most people who've never worked on SharePoint before.
2. There is no in-place editing of documents inside the Web browser like in the Google apps. I however prefer editing with all the rich capabilities of Office, but it might be a small deterrent to some.

Tags: rave, office, sharepoint
Categories: Office | Windows Live