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Microsoft Unveils Browser-Based Office Apps
snydeq writes "Microsoft followed up its Windows Azure unveiling by announcing that it will deliver lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote through the browser, a la Google Apps. Surprisingly, Office Web applications will run in Firefox and Safari, not just Internet Explorer. Far less shocking: You won't get Office Web apps free and clear as you do Google apps. The apps are meant to be an extension to locally installed instances of the next version of Microsoft Office, the same way Outlook Web Access provides access to mail without the fat Outlook client."
Do the FF/Safari versions lack all but the bare bones features like OWA for FF/Safari?
Positioning it as an extension of office is much more appealing to me than google's broadband-dependent offering. For all the times MS looks completely befuddled by consumer needs, the office team seems to know what it's doing.
will it have Clippy :p
The apps are meant to be an extension to locally installed instances of the next version of Microsoft Office, the same way Outlook Web Access provides access to mail without the fat Outlook client.
Except in order to use Outlook Web Access, I don't need to have a "locally installed instance" of Outlook. I understand where they're going with this, but the example that the author used doesn't seem very apt.
I'm curious whether they are using a common GUI toolkit for their local and web-based versions of these apps.
I'm beginning to like the idea of being able to write a locally-running app and also make it web-based in one swoop.
I guess MS wouldn't be the only ones going this way. Things like GWT and Google Gears and XULrunner make this quite possible. I'm just wondering if MS is uses similar in-house technology.
Microsoft is embracing the cloud. I'm worrying about the weather.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
Sure, it can run under Firefox and Safari, but what about the most important question: Will it run on Linux?
it is part of the Exchange email server, it's not part of the Outlook/Office.
Sure, it may look pretty, but what's the EULA going to be on this hit of the Microsoft crack pipe? The gradual tightening of their EULA's is another reason the company I work for won't entertain budget spent for new Microsoft licenses.
Have you read the silverlight EULA? Since it's job-related I did, and let me tell you it's not pretty.
We're a small business that has purchased Microsoft site licenses over the years. I gotta wonder how long Microsoft can alienate customers like us before it starts affecting their top and bottom lines.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Now all we need is a standard compliant browser to run this on! *cough*
So, basically the same idea we had at Sun years ago (about 10!) with StarPortal?!
Plus ca change.
D.
I have been using OO.org in conjunction with the ZOHO/Google Apps plugin to make Google Apps and ZOHO Office an extension to OO.org. ...and even cooler, the ZOHO developer API allows me to use ZOHO as an extension of my other web apps. So, what are the advantages of using this with MS Office?
In my quest for cross-platform capabilities, I have been using apps that generally work this way. Most of my word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, PDF (Zoho reader), documents are accessible to me in quite a few ways.
1. OO.org
2. ZOHO Office
3. Google Apps
4. The eyeOS desktop installed on my own web server.
What I would like to see now is the ability to sync them all without OO.org and use one OpenID with all of the services.
Make America grate again!
2. The patch was released before the exploit was available -- that's a win for MS.
Bzzt! Wrong!:
We discovered this vulnerability as part of our research into a limited series of targeted malware attacks against Windows XP systems that we discovered about two weeks ago through our ongoing monitoring.
Microsoft developed the patch in response to targeted attacks. Therefore exploit code was in the wild before the patch. You are right about it dating back to XP, and all prior versions of Windows. Someone, somewhere, has been exploiting this remotely exploitable security hole in highly targeted attacks for an indeterminate number of years. Who knows what valuable proprietary data they've got so far? What corporate secrets were leaked? Every time this happens we get some idiot on here blathering about how things are better now. Well that wasn't true before, was it? It wasn't true last time, was it? Note the 10 XP vulnerability blurb footing the story. What convincing evidence do you offer that this time they really, really mean it?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Here we go again: another attempt to maneuver people toward software subscriptions and changing the perception of software as a tool to an image of software as content... for which people are already accustomed - habituated, in traditional Pavlovian fashion - to forking over cash every month without really analyzing the big picture. (This is one tactic used by manipulative people to concentrate massive amounts of material wealth... toward themselves and away from everyone else. It's totally Darwinian but not very ethical.)