Silverlight to "Light-up" Microsoft Web-Based Office Apps
Four basic Office apps will be available in the cloud
Microsoft is about to release this month technical preview of their Web-based applications.
Office Web Apps will allow users to view and edit four Office apps from their PCs, phones or anywhere there is an Internet
Explorer 7 or 8 (on Windows), Safari 4 (on Mac) or Firefox 3.5 (on
Windows, Mac or Linux) installed.
As the Office Web Apps team has been saying since last fall, only those users accessing the "Web-ified" apps from IE with the Microsoft Silverlight IE plug-in installed, will get certain advanced viewing capabilities.
Gareth Howell, Program Manager of Office Web Apps, blogged: "The Office Web Apps will work well without any plugins installed, but they get even better if you have Silverlight."
He given as an example the Word Web App - when used with Silverlight, will provide:
- Faster load performance, "since typically fewer bytes need to be downloaded before showing the document."
- Improved text fidelity at 100% zoom. "This includes better text spacing and rendering."
- "Greatly improved" text fidelity at other zoom levels not 100%. "Text will respect settings set in Cleartype tuner, so you’re able to determine how much (if any) Cleartype you’d like to see. The Cleartype tuner is available on the web for older versions of Windows, and is included in Windows 7.”
- Improved accuracy of hit highlighting in Find.
PowerPoint Web App, when used with Silverlight, would provide smoother animations and "the slide will scale with the browser window size," Howell said. He added, "however Silverlight is not required for rendering or animation."
The Redmond corporation noted that Office Web Apps are designed to complement, not replace, client-based Office.
There will be three versions of the web-ified Office - for consumers, that would be available via Office Live, and two business versions. The business versions will be paid, while the consumer will be free. In addition, the business variants could be either hosted by Microsoft (as part of its “Online” family of offerings) or hostable by business users themselves. As a back-end all three versions will be using SharePoint Server, thus the business users would need to purchase SharePoint to take advantage of Office Web Apps.
Microsoft Web Apps are expected to be released in mid-2010.
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