Microsoft Office Online

Office Online is Microsoft's familiar suite of office applications configured to be served to clients through the Internet. It is targeted especially to small/medium sized organizations, and will initially be provided as a hosted service through Microsoft's own bCentral Web services portal, as well as through several 3rd party partner services such as Concentric, Micron, Qwest, and Verio.

The online offering builds on Microsoft's existing deployment of the office suite through the use of Windows Terminal Services. The Services, consisting both of server and client logic, allow individual Microsoft NT/2000/CE based machines to access a centrally located server and access and run the Office applications on that server as terminals. Office Online extends this platform by allowing the application (terminal) server to be accessed via the Internet.

Included within the suite are specially tuned versions of the Office 2000 products Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, FrontPage and Outlook. According to a Microsoft press release, inidividual users will be able to save their own customized office settings while still running the products from the host server.

For more information, including a more complete list of hosting partners, visit Microsoft's Office Online site.