I'm wondering the exact same thing. Either Microsoft has explicitly approved this use of their technology and are charging some kind of blanket license fee, or this company is illegitimately using Microsoft's software. Office is Microsoft's crown jewels, I can't see them just letting another software company making money off of it, especially of Microsoft already has plans for bringing Office to the iOS App Store.
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CloudOn Brings Free Cloud-Hosted Microsoft Office Functionality to iPad
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I'm wondering the exact same thing. Either Microsoft has explicitly approved this use of their technology and are charging some kind of blanket license fee, or this company is illegitimately using Microsoft's software. Office is Microsoft's crown jewels, I can't see them just letting another software company making money off of it, especially of Microsoft already has plans for bringing Office to the iOS App Store.
If its really just like a VNC or Citrix then I will continue running Citrix. Though it works quite well it's a pain to try using mouse-pointer based Windows applications with a finger-based touch on an iPad. You find yourself often zooming in and out to avoid clicking the wrong ribbon element.
For some occasional changes that is fine; more complicated stuff is difficult.
I'm sure my company will not allow us to use this solution; they don't even let us use Dropbox or even iCloud (yet).
But for small companies and private use that might work well. Not yet around in Japanese AppStore; when it come I still give it a try.
For some occasional changes that is fine; more complicated stuff is difficult.
I'm sure my company will not allow us to use this solution; they don't even let us use Dropbox or even iCloud (yet).
But for small companies and private use that might work well. Not yet around in Japanese AppStore; when it come I still give it a try.
I think everyone is missing the point of what this thing actually is. It isn't Office FOR the iPad, it's Office ON the iPad. As in yet another tool to make your favorite tablet that much more flexible.
If anyone needs to edit a document on the go, and can only make these edits through the desktop version of Office...well...there you go. You've got an app for that. To complain about the interface not being suited for a tablet is missing the forest for the trees.
RDP is more likely. These guys are basically selling MS Terminal Server technology (which is an awesome technology, btw).
It's very easy to do this in a legit way.
I seriously doubt MS cares about this as long as they get their license fee out of it. They license out Office apps for all kinds of uses beyond the traditional desktop app.
MS has Terminal Service licenses for uses like this.
Each connection/session requires a license.
They could have easily purchased a few thousand of them for this purpose.
Very easy for MS to audit as well.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
Is no-one else concerned that you have to provide your Dropbox credentials?
Dropbox has ticket functionality that allows apps to access your dropbox without having to give them your credentials, and I am always very wary of apps that don't use that but ask for your user name and password
Is no-one else concerned that you have to provide your Dropbox credentials?
Dropbox has ticket functionality that allows apps to access your dropbox without having to give them your credentials, and I am always very wary of apps that don't use that but ask for your user name and password
"cloud" is much more than servers. As I explained in my previous post, a cloud is when you can instantiate "servers" in an on-demand and automated fashion. This adds a ton of power than a simple server collocation arrangement, as it allows for pay-as-you-go pricing.
For instance: I've worked with a service called Twilio (http://www.twilio.com). They allow me to make and receive phone calls just by making web requests. Someone from our IT department wanted to restrict their traffic by their IP address range, and they replied quite truthfully that they can't provide an IP range because they allocate and de-allocate servers as-needed, which makes providing IPs impossible.
I've messed around with these services before, and it's almost always possible to break out of the restricted environment. Depending what you have access too, you can send a keypress for the windows menu, and gain access to the system that way.
Should be amusing when someone else works this out, and everyones dropbox credentials are compromised.
Point is though, there's very little software to actual take advantage of such a system.
Almost every 'cloud' service is just an idiot with a single HTTP server, there's no distributed system, no virtual machines, no 'self healing' system. The end consumer doesn't care, like having 'alloy wheels' on a car- it doesn't matter what the metal alloy is, it just sounds cool, so it sells.
Your IT department clearly isn't particularly clever. The IP addresses would still be in an assigned /C or /D block, regardless of them being 'reallocated'. I doubt they even would be, that's just asking for DNS caching problems.
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i might give this a try, but i do share a lot of other people's reservations about this app.
i would just hope that Microsoft is actually working on a native Office App for the iPad.
i would just hope that Microsoft is actually working on a native Office App for the iPad.
For god's sake... just give me a *real* and dedicated copy of Office that works on the iPad. Like my boss doesn't bore us to death already with his 200 slide presentations. Now I'm at the mercy of a sluggish wi-fi connection? 
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Completely agree. I think the ribbon is one of the most visually confusing interfaces ever developed.
Exactly. Pages, while still lacking some features of the desktop version, is beautifully implemented and a joy to use. It's also remarkably powerful. And I can store my documents in Apple's cloud. If I wanted to simply make "cloud" docs, there's always Google.
Dunno why you got a thumbs down. For those of us who've been using Excel since the beginning of time, that ribbon is horrendous!
<edit> Apparently someone here loves the ribbon. In the few minutes it took me to finish the thread after posted, I got a negative and so did everyone else who doesn't like the ribbon. Each to his own, but I will never buy a version of Office where it can't be turned off. Too many clicks to get the same job done and visually unappealing.
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Awesome concept! Horrible outcome. I just got an iPad 2 and this headline couldn't have come at a better time as I am in school and need to use office for homework. Everything seemed to work fine setting up accounts and dropboxes...etc. Functionality is all there and it seems to have quite a bit of features that are lacking in other app suites. I was disappointed to find out how slow it really was. To the point where I didn't want to do anything. If that is fixed it wouldn't be a bad app. I am still using Pages which I think is the best out there.
That was priceless. As much as people hate the Ribbon, I must say that you are indeed correct that the inspector takes the cake in UI kludge.
That's one thing I've noticed about the ribbon. For people like me who came into Office around 2007 rather like it. Since I learned the program with it, I find it fairly intuitive and well laid out. But people who have been using Excel and the other Office programs since, like you said, the beginning of time flat out hate it.
I'd say that because the ribbon changed the layout and work flow so much, the old guard hated it since day one, and never really gave it a chance.
I think you're the one who can't see the forest through the trees.
VNC isn't new. Desktop apps on a tablet aren't new. This is stuff teenagers could do in their spare time. There's nothing to see here.
Microsoft will release it's tablet versions soon, and this will all just be a huge waste of money ($9.5M), resources, and human time.
This seems more like a shell company being propelled by a funding company trying to raise money for it's investors.
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