Microsoft Web Office Apps Update Brings Real-Time Collaboration

Microsoft has pushed out quite the update to both its free Web Office Apps and to Office 365, with the former bringing about a much-requested functionality that Microsoft has thus far failed to provide: real-time collaboration. Office 365 users will also be seeing some changes with the update, however, with a total of three tweaks being made.

The update brings real-time collaboration to Office Web Apps, which you can see in action in the screenshot above. From this, documents and such in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint stored in SkyDrive can be edited with other collaborators at the same time. This change will be followed by more changes that take place in coming months as Microsoft increases it Web Apps push.

Beyond this, Office 365 Home Premium subscribers — whether they paid for their license or not — will get the special perks that come with the package, namely 60 minutes on Skype and 20GB of additional storage on SkyDrive. On the business side of Office 365, enterprise users now get Yammer Enterprise on top of it, and will be able to give other users Yammer access.

The update is being heralded in with a hashtag campaign for the day called #getitdone, which should get you some Office-related social connections until the morrow rolls around. What do you think about the changes? Spot-on for what Microsoft Office users have been needing, or a waste of focus that would have been best directed elsewhere?

SOURCE: TechCrunch