Office Web Applications First Look

These look great, good work!

Couple of points:

- I think it is just the right move to merge Office Live Workspace and Skydrive, never made much sense to have to different places. At the same time, I fear that some cool features of OLW will be lost in the transition, at least they aren't present in the current preview bits. Namley, a) versioning and b) pdf preview. On a), OLW always kept different versions saved, so you could go back to old versions of a document. That was quite handy, so I hope something similiar will be added to Skydrive at some point. On b), OLW had a web preview of pdf files in the Workspace. The quality was actually quite poor, but this was still a VERY usefull feature, because one could essentially surf around and have a quick look at all files in the workspace.

- Rich client access. Right now this works via some WebDAV like thing. Little side tip for those in the CTP: click the link in the web app to open one of the files in the desktop version, then pick "save as" and copy the URL from there. Just use the part that refers to the folder path. Then you can add a new network location (in explorer at the computer level, parallel to your drives) to this URL. And bang, you have explorer access to your Skydrive folder. You can drag and drop files to Skydrive now REALLY easily and quickly. The real question is whether this is going to be the main access route for rich clients, or whether we will see some sync solution, hopefully based on Mesh technology to Skydrive. If that is the case, I'm wondering whether this will be "super smart": lets say I have a Skydrive folder synched to my local disc. I then open the file from local disc with Word. Will Word then recognise that this is a Skydrive/Mesh folder, and if I'm online will go into multiple author mode so that multiple authors can simultanisouly work on the document?