Cloud Collaboration of Microsoft Office Web App

Cloud collaboration services are developing fast, and an increasing number of them are about to change our life.On mentioning cloud collaboration, you may immediately come up with an example: Google Docs. However, in this blog, I’m introducing another similar service: Office Web App, which is based on Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

There are nearly 50 million users in the use of the built-in Office Web Apps in SkyDrive and Hotmail. Take Word as an example: the collaboration features in Word Web App is compatible with Word 2010, Word for Mac 2011. In Word Web App, while another user is in the editing of this document, you can see the yellow bubble on the reminded article:

The following picture is the UI of multiplayer editing in Word 2010. You can see the position where other users are editing, as well as the contents they havs edited (with green background). You can also be view who is in the editing in the status bar in the bottom.

Differently with Google Docs, Word Web App does not support the real-time synchronous collaboration mode. But if you need real-time, you may use the OneNote Web App. This means that if you are editing a piece of content, in order to prevent confusion, Word Web App will prevent other people to edit the contents of this section, until you press the save.

Here is a detailed video to show how it works: