Office 15 with Changes to Office Web Apps

Starting with the upcoming availability of the Office 15 productivity suite, Microsoft plans on delivering a series of changes to the Office Web Apps that it currently provided to its users. 

Basically, Microsoft is expected to move its Office Web Apps to a new and separate server product, which should enable faster performance and a better experience. 

These tweaks are meant to alter the web versions of Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley notes in a recent article. 

Office 15 / SharePoint 15 will bring along a product called Office Web Apps Server, which should be able to deliver multiple SharePoint farms for viewing and editing documents. 

A server or a farm running Office Web Apps is also said to provide the ability to view files that have been stored in data stores. Files on SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and Lync will also be accessible this way. 

Moreover, there will be support for URL-accessible file servers, as well as for a series of third-party stores that offer integration at the moment, such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText and Oracle, Mary Jo Foley notes in the aforementioned article. 

This will mark a move away from the manner in which users are currently accessing these Office Web Apps through SkyDrive, Hotmail and Docs.com, using browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and/or Safari. 

At the moment, Microsoft also provides businesses with the option to host Office Web Apps on SharePoint on-premises and to make them accessible through Office 365 cloud plans.

Apparently, Microsoft’s plan is to separate Office Web Apps from SharePoint so that updates could be delivered to them independently, and that multiple SharePoint farms could be served simultaneously. 

Starting with the SharePoint 15 Technical Preview, the mobile version of Office Web Apps is powered by the new Office Web Apps Server, and not through the SharePoint Server.

For the time being, Microsoft hasn’t offered confirmation on the matter, but should deliver specific details on this, as the public beta of Office 15 / SharePoint 15 approaches in the summer.

Posted in: Preview, Software