Office Web Apps: Collaboration with co-authoring

Have you tried Microsoft’s Office Web Apps? Microsoft has introduced a fully featured, inclusive approach to productivity that spans platforms, devices, browsers, online and offline experiences. Since we launched the Office Web Apps in 2010, we have made various investments in Office Web Apps to ensure people can work together, author documents and access Office content anytime, from anywhere, with ease. The Office 365 blog recently posted about the immense benefits and future plans of Office Web Apps, and we wanted to share them with you. You can also read the full article here.

As we think about how people communicate and collaborate today and how their needs will evolve in the future, we'd like to share our plans for some of the investments we are making in the Office Web Apps over the next year and beyond. Most excitingly, this includes big changes in co-authoring capabilities.

Since first introducing co-authoring in the Office Web Apps, we’ve seen an increasing demand for more fluid and dynamic collaboration capabilities when working online. We’ll introduce real time co-authoring in the Office Web Apps so that all file authors will automatically see presence and edits from others as they happen without needing to refresh. This is a subtle change, but a great enhancement to enable even richer collaboration.

We have started to deliver on this in the PowerPoint Web App where users can now see each other's changes almost immediately. You can see it in action in the video below or give it a try yourself with your presentations stored in SkyDrive or SharePoint Online. In the next few months you'll see PowerPoint Web App co-authoring get even faster and real time co-authoring support in the other Office Web Apps.

Check out this video and get an idea of how cool co-authoring in Office Web Apps really is.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wdh-PE3OEk&feature=player_embedded]