I am finding, as I travel and talk to IT Pros around my territory, that there are still a lot of things Microsoft does that people just don’t know about yet.
“Like what?”
Well.. did you know that you have 25GB of space that you can use for free?
“Do tell!”
Microsoft Windows Live SkyDrive is a free cloud (remember SaaS?) service that gives you 25GB of space for your photos and your documents. Which leads me to the next “secret” that people don’t know about…
“What’s that?”
Did you know that you not only can store and share your documents.. you can EDIT them there. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote documents can be edited using free WebApps.
“WebApps? Like the ones that can run in SharePoint 2010?”
Exactly like that. Except that this is FREE. For NO $$$ you can create and edit documents.. or store and later update (or allow your friends to edit) documents from your own SkyDrive. All you need is a current browser..
“I don’t need Internet Explorer?”
Nope.. Newest versions of IE, Safari, FireFox, and Chrome work equally well.. and with your browser you can work with and edit your documents. It’s really slick. It’s easy. It’s very useful. And did I say “FREE”?
“Yes, you did.”
Ah. Well.. if you are also considering using this kind of web-based document editing in your own SharePoint installation as the Office WebApps, this is a really good way to try it out. Here are some more resources for you:
- Office WebApps Overview
- Overview of Office WebApps on TechNet
- Deploy Office Web Apps for your organization
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Have you tried either the Office WebApps or the capabilities of Windows Live SkyDrive? What do you like about them? What do you hate about them? What are you ambivalent about? Add a comment here.
And tomorrow I’m going to share with you a great deal on a subscription that will let you download everything you need to evaluate all of the latest tools and software from Microsoft.
Absolutely Full of I.T. 