Office For iOS Paves Way For Storage In Any Cloud

Microsoft has thrown open its iOS Office apps to third-party cloud services, allowing any online storage provider to burrow inside, and with the same support for other mobile and browser versions in the pipeline. The feature, launching today on the iPhone and iPad versions of Office, but coming for Office for Windows 10 and for Android in time, should mean that no matter which cloud store you prefer – Box, iCloud, or something else – it should show up in the "Locations" file picker. Meanwhile, there's also new Office Online integration support, with Microsoft hoping other services will bake the apps into their platforms.

The new cloud functionality builds on Microsoft's partnership with Dropbox back in November. There, despite being a direct rival to Microsoft's own OneDrive storage service, Dropbox got equal treatment as a file store for documents.

Previously, if you wanted to open documents, you'd either have to have them saved locally on the device you were using, or copy them over to OneDrive.

Microsoft's other change is in how Office Online can be embedded into other services. For instance, Box, Citrix, and Salesforce are already onboard with injecting versions of the Office Online apps into their browser-based interfaces, so that users can open and edit files stored there without having to go to a separate tab.

Although it might seem counter-intuitive for Microsoft to embrace its rivals so thoroughly, it does make sense when you consider the company is trying to reinvent itself as a ubiquitous software and services provider.

If that's going to work – and if users are going to start automatically thinking of Office rather than, say, Google Docs – then it has to be available not only on all the platforms they rely upon, but work seamlessly with the storage services they're already invested in.

SOURCE Microsoft