The New Modern Office
So, what is so special about Office 365 Home Premium ? Basically this product is a cloud edition of the Microsoft Office. It is compatible with existing Office and future standalone version of Office. This web version comes with web app version of the popular applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint that works over the internet. With Skydrive, users can share out their files with permissions to allow online collaboration.
For example, an editor reporting the technology event can upload his word file to skydrive and share it with it’s group of editors based in Singapore and Malaysia. They can join in to co-author the document over the internet in real time. The beauty of it is that the editors do not even need to have a local installation of the Office software as their license is tagged to their Microsoft ID.
Effectively, the author can reside in any part of the world and co-author a shared document so long there is an internet connection.
If you have heard of Office 365, you should be familiar with this service. It is a subscription service meant for business and enterprises. With Office 365 Home Premium, this service is available to all users be it Mac or PC. Users will pay for a one year license and it can be used on 5 PC or Macs. As it is hosted on the cloud, the applications will always be up to date.
The service comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote and Outlook. After the subscription expires, users can continue to use it but stop receiving updates or you can choose to pay for another year of subscription to get updates to the software. This is quite different from the usual Office software package that you buy from retailers. The price plans or subscription per month should be quite similar to the Office 365 service for businesses and enterprises.
On the next page, we have a video showing how a shared document on Skydrive can be used to co-author a document.
