Microsoft Office on the Web

Just in case last week's NY Times article Revamped Microsoft Office Will Be Free On the Web slipped by you. According to the article, the latest version, talked about for a really long time, will include the usual Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but this version will be available online for free allowing users to store documents on the Web. It is scheduled to be available in June of this year.

Users of the new version of Office will be able to share and work on the same documents and presentations over the Internet rather than e-mailing files back and forth to each other.

Lexis for Microsoft at Legaltech 2010

Lexis presented its new product in a more low key fashion. No flashing screens or classical musicians, just a solid presentation by Lexis reps, with Microsoft engineers available to answer questions.
Lexis for Microsoft Office will be introduced to law firms this spring and to the academic marketplace in the fall. It allows users to access Lexis while reviewing an Outlook email message or Word document, opens relevant information from Lexis on the right and embeds links and Shepard’s signals into the Outlook email or Word document. It includes a toolbar that lets you Shepardize while still in Word, with the Shepard's results showing up on the right. It seems like it will be a real timesaver, in that it allows you to edit documents and research with switching between tabs or windows.

This news release has more information.

Free Web-based Microsoft Office 2010

To follow up on our previous post featuring the free web-based Microsoft Office 2010, here is a YouTube demo video previewing the Office web application in Windows Live.

Microsoft Free Web Based Version of Office 2010

Via ReadWrite Enterprise, Steven Walling wrote an article titled Microsoft Previews Free Web-based Version of Office 2010 where he reviews the free web-based Microsoft office. Starting on September 17, Microsoft has made a limited preview of Word, Excel and PowerPoint available and "has officially said that a more widely-available beta of Web Apps will arrive this fall."

Click the title of the article (above) to access the full article that includes screenshots and short summaries by the author. Can Microsoft compete with already existing services such are Google Documents, Zoho, or ThinkFree? Any thoughts?