Microsoft is Renaming Office Online to Just Office
Now it is big news for users of Office Online Web apps that Microsoft is renaming Office Online to just Office. According to the sources, after considering the marketing strategies as well as technical content, this new name will come in effect.
What they Say
“Because our offerings have evolved to provide access to apps on more than one platform, it no longer makes sense to use any platform-specific sub-brands,”
– Bill Doll, senior product marketing officer at Microsoft.
Moreover, Microsoft is going to apply same concept for all the web apps “Word Online” or “Excel Online” and all, and these will be known simply as Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Possibility is that it would be referred as “Office For Web”, in terms of future perspective. But Microsoft claims this name will be used to avoid naming confusion, so that user could easily differentiating between Office on Mac, iOS, Android, Windows or web.
Microsoft’s Fluid Framework
Web for Office Apps is the main focus for Microsoft. Though it seems a bit pointless and confusing to users, yet Microsoft have broader aspect behind this new branding as they find this change inevitable for the bright future of Office, in particular , related to web.
Microsoft is giving more importance to the Office, majorly for web. In fact, last year, they ceased their work in the area of the development of touch –friendly Office Apps for Windows and made web development their priority. Moreover, a new Fluid Framework is in progress which will improve the functionality of Office for the browser. This Fluid Framework will be a collaboration platform which is planned to make possible, real-time updates across apps. This functionality will work not only for Microsoft Office Apps, but for third parties as well. Using this a user could make changes in any of the Office app for example, Excel Sheet that too within the environment of Teams Chat could be editable. It will improve functionality of Office in the browser by providing multi-person collaboration, text translation as well as rendering new flexible document format.
Microsoft is in the mode of forming a solid foundation for the future of Office and Windows. By introducing such an effective cross-platform framework i.e. Fluid Framework, Microsoft is paving the smooth path for the web version of Office to become more robust in the coming years.
This concept is applicable for Online Office Apps, Microsoft’s Office name change is not meant for other products like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Project Online, as well as Office Online Server. Their signature will remain same, as per the sources.
Conclusion
Microsoft is renaming Office Online to just Office, which is a well-known web based suite of Office Applications. So, applications like Excel Online will also be termed as normal Excel, Word or Power-point and so on. Microsoft is planning to introduce the Fluid framework for Online Office Apps to provide more flexibility to the user in terms of using these across many platforms. As per Microsoft, soon this change in branding will come in effect.