Microsoft releases Office Online Server for organizations

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Office 2016 won’t print

Microsoft recently announced the availability of Office Online Server (OOS), a direct successor to Office Web Apps Server 2013. Office Online Server is designed to allow enterprise organizations deliver the web versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote to their customers.

What’s interesting about this is that Web Apps will be delivered to customers from the organization’s own data centers instead of Microsoft servers. The good thing here is that Office Online Server will grant folks the same basic features similar to if the service was being delivered from Microsoft servers.

With this version of Office Online Server, users can take advantage of real-time co-authoring, something that was not available in the previous version.

Here’s what Microsoft had to say via its blog post:

“OOS scales well for your enterprise whether you have 100 employees or 100,000. The architecture enables one OOS farm to serve multiple SharePoint, Exchange and Skype for Business instances. OOS is designed to work with SharePoint Server 2016, Exchange Server 2016 and Skype for Business Server 2016. It is also backwards compatible with SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013 and Lync Server 2013. You can also integrate other products with OOS through our public APIs.”

According to Microsoft, if businesses configure Office Online Server with Skype for Business 2016, SharePoint Server 2016, and Exchange Server 2016, the following is possible:

  • When you integrate OOS with SharePoint Server 2016, generally available starting today, you can create, share and collaborate on Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote files in your browser. Most notably, OOS with SharePoint lets multiple people work on a document at the same time and see everyone’s changes as they happen. OOS also works with SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013 or Lync Server 2013 with Office Web Apps Server 2013. So be at ease if you’re still running them — you will not need to run both Office Web Apps Server 2013 and OOS.
  • By integrating OOS with Exchange Server 2016, you can view and edit Office file attachments in Outlook on the web and send back a reply without ever leaving your browser.
  • With Skype for Business Server 2016, OOS enables high fidelity viewing of PowerPoint Online when sharing PowerPoint presentations during meetings.

Head over to the Volume License Servicing Center to download OOS.

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