The most significant improvements in Office 2010 — and the ones that offer the most interesting possibilities for the organizations are how the software facilitates collaboration among multiple users. Microsoft Web Apps allows multiple users to collaborate over the Internet, while the new SharePoint Workspace (previously known as Microsoft Groove), changes how users can work together on projects within an office environment.

Office 2010’s web-based component, a follow-up to Office Live Workspace , is called Office Web Apps. The Office Web Apps include online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (an online place to keep online notebooks containing notes, links, audio, and video clips). The Office Web Apps let users create, edit, save, and collaborate on documents online. They let users access their files anywhere, from any device (including smartphones) with an Internet connection and a web browser. Microsoft is expected to launch Office 2010 and Office Web Apps in mid-June 2010. The Office Web Apps versions of Word and OneNote may become available some weeks after launch, though.

Office Web Apps are free through Windows Live, Microsoft’s array of online services (Windows Live includes over 33 services like Hotmail email, SkyDrive file storage, an online contact database, photo gallery, instant messaging, personal blog spaces, maps, and mobile phone services and on and on. See a full list of all the Windows Live services).

Office Web Apps have a similar look and feel to their desktop-based counterparts, and are designed to work well in the Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox web browsers. All the applications sport the Ribbon menu system from Office 2007 and 2010.

There are two versions of Office Web Apps:

Microsoft Office Web Apps for Home and School (H3)

This free consumer version requires no purchase of Office 2010. It allows a single person or group to create and edit documents and collaborate or work together on the documents through a web browser, in real time. This version requires users to save documents to Windows Live SkyDrive before collaborating on them (each free Windows Live SkyDrive account comes with a hefty 25 gigabytes of storage).

The free Microsoft Web Apps can do the basics, but not all the functions of the desktop versions of Office 2010. The Word web app lets you create basic word processing documents that can include tables, bullets, styles, spell checking, and auto-correct. You can share and co-author documents in real time. The web version of Excel permits collaborating on spreadsheets as well in real time and employs the same Excel formulas as the desktop version. It also allows users to publish spreadsheets to blogs, wikis, or other websites. The web app version of PowerPoint lets users pick a theme, edit slide layouts, add or remove slides, edit text, add animations, and basic video and image editing.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/images/Web-Apps-overview/WebApps-03_ProgramsYouKnow.jpg

The free version of Office Web Apps is a good alternative for many organizations. The allotted 25 GB storage space from SkyDrive could serve many organizations’ day-to-day needs (for perspective, a standard CD-ROM can hold 700 MB, so SkyDrive can hold over 35 CD-ROMs’ worth of data). You can collaborate with colleagues over the Internet regardless of physical location.

Microsoft Office Web Apps for Organizations (H3)

This enterprise version is free with the purchase or donation request of Office 2010 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010. This version stores shared files in your own SharePoint repository, rather than on the Windows Live website.

Microsoft Office Web Apps for Organizations lets users collaborate in two different ways:
1.Through a web-based interface.
2.Directly through the Desktop applications themselves, through a process Microsoft calls co-authoring.

Rather than having to “check out” shared files as in older versions of SharePoint, multiple employees can open, edit, and save changes to an Office file from a SharePoint repository at once. SharePoint keeps a record of what edits were made by each user, similar to the Track Changes feature. If your organization uses Office Communications Server, employees working on a document together will even be able to see each other’s online status and send each other messages directly from the Office interface. For an in-depth discussion of how these live collaborations work, see this blog post from Jonathan Bailor of Microsoft’s Word 2010 team and this post from the Office Web Apps team.

Computers must be running Office 2010 for desktop-based collaboration in Microsoft Office Web Apps for Organizations; however, computers that don’t have Office 2010 can still access the browser-based version. In other words, in an organization running SharePoint Server 2010, an employee using Office 2010 and an employee using the web interface can collaborate with each other, even if the latter employee doesn’t have Office 2010 installed.