Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/24/microsoft_facebook_office_docs_update/
Microsoft punts 'significant' Office for Facebook update
Tag and search
Posted in Channel, 24th August 2010 23:39 GMT
Microsoft claims to have significantly reworked the Office applications for Facebook adjunct to its main, $14bn Office applications business.
The company Tuesday unveiled changes to Docs it said addressed two key shortcomings following feedback from users. Those shortcomings? The inability for users to organize their own documents, and problems discovering other peoples' Docs documents.
Docs, still in beta, will now let Facebookers find each others' work using tags that list a document by subject while you can also search by people and pages.
Documents, meanwhile, can now be tagged using keywords. There was no word when, or if, Docs would lose its beta-label status.
The update comes as students return to schools and colleges in the US.
Docs was unveiled in April, as something based on Office Web apps that would let users create and share documents authored in Office 2010.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents can be created inside Facebook or on a PC and then uploaded to Facebook, where the documents can be viewed and edited within a web browser or on either a PC or Mac that's loaded with Office.
Docs is the child of Microsoft's FUSE Labs, created by chief software architect Ray Ozzie in October 2009. ®