Microsoft slaps Google on the face with the launching of an online Microsoft Office 2007 for users to test drive the beta version product.

The only requirements of the system other than the standard Internet Explorer 5.5 is Critrix support which is installed automatically during your first “test drive”.

An enormous amount of users have tried out the beta test online software which resulted in “wait” times for the user before being able to test drive the application but the waiting time outweighs the experience of being able to test the product.

The test environment includes Office 2007 as well as tutorials on how to use the product upon loading the application being tried out. The tutorial is comprehensive and great for learning more about the product.

On a technical perspective this is not an online solution per se but more of remote desktop connectivity via Citrix which in turn uses Terminal Services.

I have worked and deployed a lot of applications using Citrix Metaframe and I am impressed by the speed by which this technology addresses a corporation’s need for an immediate online connectivity for an application.

I beleive Microsoft is testing the waters on the public’s initial response of using an online office suite to crush the pathetic excel release of Google.

A corporation may well in fact setup a dedicated computer hosting the office application and internal users just need to connect to the server for their office needs. However licensing issues is a big issue for this; what I am saying is that Microsoft may be testing this environment and who knows, they may actually buy the company of Citrix; or given that the technology only uses Terminal Services then Microsoft can just easily include this in their next version of Vista.

Anyways, we’ll see how this turns out and hopefully kicks Google in the butt soon.

First go and test drive the suite here.

[tags]Microsoft, Office 2007[/tags]