Microsoft Web Apps is about to take a major leap that would lead it to match the level of service that Google Docs now offers. First, they are going to introduce the collaboration in real time and secondly, they plan extend your access to Android tablets, after having already taken it to Windows 8 tablets and iPad. Apart from these two notable points, they will improve editing and co-publishing functions and will enhance the speed of loading documents.
In a blog post signed by Amanda Lefevre, Product Marketing Manager, she reported on these developments while recalling the beginnings of this service. From the beginning, back in 2010, the idea was Bring Office Suite Features to the Cloud so that you could work on your documents from anywhere and that at the same time you could share them to be able to carry out collaborative work. There we find Word, Power Point, Excel and One Note as a web application.
This last section was not entirely well polished. Before, we needed to refresh the page to see what changes were being made by the people we had granted edit permissions. Now we can see in real time what changes are taking place in the document. In this video you can see it working.
For the improvement in collaboration capabilities to make sense, it is important that documents can be accessed from as many devices as possible so as not to exclude different collaborators or situations. Windows 8 tablets and iPads already have access to this service through any browser, in the first case, and through Safari in the second. Now it will be support for mobile version of Chrome to be able to view and edit those documents from Android tablets, a type of device with a great presence in the market, which is also growing.
Source: Microsoft Office Blog