Office as a service
One of my personal favorite new investment areas of the new Office release is how the Office client has transformed to a service. This is game changing and marries the beautiful, rich value of a rich client with the deployment ease of a browser app. Many people in today’s world carry multiple devices that have compute power, local storage and a unique form factor. Users shouldn’t have to use a browser experience as the lowest common denominator across all their devices when they can enjoy rich apps that deliver optimized experiences – good examples of apps that do this today are Skype, Netflix and SkyDrive. John Jendrezak has written a nice blog post on the Office Next blog on this topic that I recommend checking out @ https://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/07/17/office-and-the-cloud.aspx. This blog post is my personal view on the value Office as a service delivers to an end user. If you’re looking for the value this brings to IT Professionals in the areas of deployment and administration, check out Jeremy’s post @ https://community.office365.com/en-us/preview/blogs/office365preview/archive/2012/07/17/office-365-proplus-administrator-series-office-365-proplus-administrator-overview.aspx.
The new Office delivers a modern experience across PC, tablets, browsers and smartphones without compromise. Whether you’re on your Windows machine or on the go, you can sign in and quickly get access to the latest version of Office with your personalized settings and documents.
On all your Windows PCs and tablets, you can install Office quickly from the Internet. Your Office is always up-to-date with the latest features and takes advantage of your local machine hardware including compute power, graphics and storage allowing you to work the way you want when you’re connected to the Internet and offline. The new Office user experience is optimized for touch, keyboard, mouse and pen. It’s designed to put the content front and center allowing you to read, create and interact with beautiful documents. You just have to sign in to your Office with your ID and you will immediately have access to your recent files and settings stored in the cloud. It will even point you to the last position you were reading in a document on any PC you use.
When you’re on the go and have access to a browser, all you have to do is sign in to SkyDrive and use the latest version of Office Web Apps to view, edit and create beautiful Office documents. We’ll make sure document fidelity is maintained at all times. If you’re on the go and have access to a Windows PC, you can take advantage of Office on Demand - a new way to quickly deliver rich Office applications to a PC very quickly using application streaming technology. Office on Demand streams and launches a temporary copy of an Office app without installing it and when you log off, the application and the files you were working on are deleted. On mobile devices, we also offer great experiences that I will write about in the future.
I highly recommend trying it out yourself @ https://www.office.com/preview ! Another benefit of the new Office is that you can install it side-by-side with an older version of Office, making it very easy for you to try out. :-)