Microsoft opens app store for Office 2013 With the next version of its business productivity suite already in public preview, Microsoft has launched a beta version of the Office Store, a marketplace for developers to distribute web-based add-ons for Office and SharePoint. "We know our users spend an incredible amount of time using the Microsoft Office suite," writes …
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Less than it used to. Would you rather great chunks of dubious third-party VBA code that have wide-ranging access running under your user account, or would you prefer sand-boxed plug-in web-applications that observe things like the same-origin policy, have a unified approach to installing and uninstalling all apps, no ability (or need) to install or modify DLLs, managed interaction with the user's UI rather than throwing up Modal windows wherever it wants. In fact, a unified GUI system for all applications based on HTML5 and JQuery. It's nice stuff. Even isolated for performance purposes so that it can't just run away with your system resources anymore. Seriously, the neophobia around here is getting out of control.
"Especially if the IT department has blocked Internet access."
There's no intrinsic need to connect to the Internet with these. They're applications that can be hosted within Office that can use HTML5 and a JavaScript API. They can still be entirely local.
Now, don't get me wrong... Microsoft is a company like any other and the main thing which drives a company is making a profit. Nothing wrong with that.
But aren't they overdoing things a little as of late?
I mean; Office 2010. I fire up Word, and I want to start a new document, say a contract. I simply select new document, go to the templates section and from there I can search a whole collection of templates straight from office.com. That's simply good service which IMO adds to the overall value of the product. People & companies provide templates for others to use them, available straight from within Office.
But these days it seems to me as if MS wants to get rid of all that and instead introduce stores where we should buy into all this.. Of course while they sit at the middle of the revenue; both developers and users need to pay Microsoft.
I hope we do realize the risk here... Its not unimaginable that Microsoft will simply provide less software and features themselves, and let the gaps be filled in by (paying!) 3rd parties. So effectively getting customers to pay more while they actually get less.
"I mean; Office 2010. I fire up Word, and I want to start a new document, say a contract. I simply select new document, go to the templates section and from there I can search a whole collection of templates straight from office.com"
I'm not sure how you're finding that to be different in Office 2013. I have the preview running on Windows 8 and the first thing that happens when I start Word is I get a large page of templates with big colourful previews so I can see what they look like. On the left is a list of my recent documents and a link to browse for other documents. Additionally, along the top is a search box to search through online templates and a menu offering further categories such as Letters, Labels, Cards...
So it sounds like you actually still have everything you just asked about right on the opening screen for Word. None of this has suddenly shifted to being a pay model in Office 2013.
"I hope we do realize the risk here... Its not unimaginable that Microsoft will simply provide less software and features themselves, and let the gaps be filled in by (paying!) 3rd parties. So effectively getting customers to pay more while they actually get less."
That may happen, but the point is that there is no evidence of it and no change toward it in 2013. The introduction of an Office store is a good thing. Firstly, it provides a central way for makers of Office plugins to market and sell their goods, encouraging developers to produce them, especially small developers who would struggle to self-market and sell add-ons and greater ability to know they wont get ripped off. Secondly, it provides greater security for us the user because we have a central system where we can see add-ons are signed and see reviews on it, we can be sure if it is updated we know about and get that update, we can search for what we need in a central place. Basically, win-win for developers and users.
Seriously, word + dog around me switched to email + Google Apps....I still have an Office suite installed but I probably launch it like once a month now that Google Drive is syncing everything among my machines thus I can open everything in a browser anywhere, without Office (Google Docs.)
TBH after seeing the uber-arrogant, pigheaded (non-)response to the public outcry about this piece of junk called Metro/W8 I started thinking about getting MS booted from everywhere it's possible - first up is Office, I can already see the end of the line...
Yes. Most of the corporate world uses Office. You can do a huge amount more with Office than you can with Google Apps, both in terms of pure functionality and in terms of locking down data, rolling it out and maintaining it.
Particularly those that do not want to hand all their data over to a company that has a business model based around data mining and selling you to advertisers. Take a look at the file permissions system in Server 2012. It's not exclusive to Office, but it will give you an idea of the sort of thing that appeals to many big businesses in having an MS infrastructure. You can DRM files to be accessible only by certain machines, user accounts, geographical locations or when on a particular VPN. It can even run regular expressions on documents so that any spreadsheet with a Social Security Number or a document with a particular keyword gets automatically locked down. And that integrates with SharePoint which integrates with Office 2013. I'm not really an expert in Office - there are a lot of other use-cases - but this is one that I care about which would not be possible so far as I know with Google Apps. (aside from my preferring the interface in Office 2013).
Yes. A lot of corporates do whether you're front-office, back-office or just the janitor. We don't like using it but it's what gets installed on our computers. I haven't decided yet which annoys me more - Visual Studio or Word. Excel is just gawdawful but at least I don't have to use that much.
What I hate most about Word is the way it keeps assuming it knows what I want - it rarely does.
What I hate most about VS is the clunky UI that seems designed to get in the way and piss me off at every turn.
.. have an enterprise store-type environment? Or is it just me that hates the idea of individual users having their own customised (and outside of IT), undocumented setup?
Allowing controlled plugins, good (under some circumstances! - how are they going to work if said employee is out of reach of Internet access for some reason?)
Allowing individual people to have customised, uncontrolled setups - bad.
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