Microsoft Office Reboot Makes The Software Giant Seem Social Again

This week Microsoft unveiled their next suite of productivity tools, Office 365, and with it they've ushered in a new era of social connectedness for their potential future users. At the press conference on Monday that took place in order to usher in the software for later this year, corporate vice president for Office Kirk Koenigsbauer showed several demonstrations of use-cases for the software in the near future. The first of these cases used Microsoft's newest Lync application, Koenigsbauer showing off a five-person video chat with drag-and-drop additions of users to the room.

Inside Lync, users will soon be able to work live with a PowerPoint presentation which, dropped onto a shared space between each user in the chat, can be seen edited or presented in real time. Touch-screen integration appears to be live here in the demonstration stages of the software, and PowerPoint is only one of many applications that will work with Lync in Office 365 in the near future.

Another application set to work with Lync for live chatting is OneNote. With OneNote via Lync, users will be able to show their digital notebooks to one another and edit them in real time much as they're able to do this with PowerPoint. This very much appears to be Microsoft's answer to the Google+ integration of Google Docs into Google+ Hangouts, that being a web-based collaborative working environment as well.

Check out our Microsoft Office 365 portal for more information on the software as it gets closer to reality later this year! Also note that you can download this software in preview form right now!