The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, VP and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Plantronics is on the cutting edge of a shift in how people work, and how smarter and more personal computers, such as mobile phones, are allowing this shift to happen.

A personal assistant for everyone (no, it’s not Siri)

InstantMeeting on the iPhone

Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and making delegating them affordable for all. In the case of InstantMeeting, it means I can work right up until a minute before my conference call or hop in the car knowing I’ll get a reminder when I need to get on the call, and will effectively touch a button to connect. I do have to manually enter some conference numbers because the app can’t read the bridge information, but it’s pretty solid. It’s similar to having someone outside my office connecting my calls so I can move seamlessly through my work until the exact moment I’m needed.

Expensify lets me snap a picture of my receipts and then automatically scans them for the relevant line items to create an expense report in a few minutes. The mobile app allows me to take those pictures on my mobile the moment I get my receipt and shoot them to the cloud, where Expensify does all the heavy lifting. My days of scrounging receipts from the bottom of my bag and taping them to copy paper are over, as are my efforts to then transfer that information to Excel.

Siri, of course, takes all kinds of dictation like a pro and helps find nearby restaurants, services and other items much like a real personal assistant would. Vlingo also does some of this for Android users. There are scores of other apps such as TripIt Pro making it easier and less time-consuming to book and keep track of travel, something those lucky souls who have worked at a company with a travel bureau will be glad to learn.

This isn’t just nice; it’s necessary

Just as computers helped drive productivity thanks to replacing typewriters with word processing software and calculators with spreadsheets, these new apps will help boost productivity for the masses who don’t have an assistant at their beck and call. And given that workers are being asked to do more in a day, gaining those two or three hours back each month that it takes to pull together an expense report, or the thirty minutes required to book a trip (or even avoiding the hours lost to flight delays) is a necessity.

And as we handle more and more information coming at us, it’s harder to sink into the uninterrupted flow of work, so being able to maximize that time knowing your phone can ping you when you have to join a call and then connect you can help you relax into work. Yes, these apps all take some time to set up and learn how to use (some may require you to invest in setting up rules so the app can better learn what you need from it), but much like training an assistant, the effort pays off. And thanks to advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, better data processing and algorithms, employees don’t have to pay quite as much to offload non-core tasks.

For more on how apps, computing and broadband will change the way people work, come to our GigaOM Net:Work event in San Francisco next week.

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As we’ve covered before, when more workers spend more time away from company headquarters, the size of offices may shrink. But will campuses change in any other ways?

It’s a question that the MIT Technology Review tackled recently via a photo gallery of innovative offices built to serve a more mobile and collaborative workforce. The photos are worth checking out at the magazine’s site, but what general lessons can be gleaned from taking a look?

Giant conference rooms give way to smaller collaboration spaces. MIT cites Microsoft’s newly renovated offices in Redmond, Washington as an example of this trend. “Pods” helps small teams there come together for short bursts of creative collaboration. “In these temporary work spaces, teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a time.” MIT writes.

Small but not cramped. With more workers out of the office, companies may need less space but that doesn’t mean they want things to feel cramped – or for team members to worry about finding space to work at the office when they need it. To solve these issues, “Steelcase, an office design company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed to use minimal space but create an open feeling through strategic placement of drawers and privacy panels.”

Privacy amidst collaboration. People may now be coming to the office more for collaboration than to buckle down on individual tasks, but even in the midst of group work, team members still occasionally need privacy to make a call or hammer out a conflict. A “pod-like installation with adjustable privacy screens allows for semi-private meetings in communal areas,” is the answer at Steelcase.

Bringing the outside in. Research shows simply seeing nature is good for your brain and your productivity. Some offices, like Rackspace, an IT hosting company, are taking advantage by bringing the outside in, with spaces that “mimic a garden, complete with decking, swings, and fake grass.”

Is your physical office space ready for the workstyle of the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user :mrMark:.

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This update brings Word into line with the Excel and OneNote Web Apps, which have had co-authoring features since launch, and also with its main web app competitor, Google Docs.

When Word Web App was released, I was told by Microsoft that co-authoring wasn’t available as it was “too distracting” for users to have others come in and edit a document they were working on. Clearly, Microsoft has changed its mind on this point, but it has also put a great deal of work into making sure the Word Web App co-authoring experience doesn’t confuse. As shown in the image below, there are notifications to alert users when a collaborator is editing the document, and there are also notifications to alert users when a specific section is being edited. To prevent conflicts, only a single user can edit a paragraph at a time; when a user starts editing a paragraph, a lock is placed on it until the document is saved. If a collaborator saves the document, a notification pops up, letting the user know that they need to save the document to see updates.  It’s certainly a less fluid collaboration experience that Google Docs’, but presumably one Microsoft believes is less distracting for users.

Let us know what you think of Word Web App co-authoring in the comments.

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Signup and Setup

Office 365 is relatively straightforward to set up, only requiring users to enter a few details; you don’t need to be an experienced IT admin to get going.  After signing up with Office 365, it takes a little while for Office 365 to bring online the hosted instances of Exchange and SharePoint, but the whole process takes less than ten minutes. With Google Apps you’ll need your own domain and will have to verify it (Office 365 will provide one for you), which means that setup is more involved and will probably take a little longer, but there is a wizard to help step you through it.

Admin page/Dashboard

The Office 365 admin page has options for managing users and passwords, websites, and for managing your Office 365 subscription. Google Apps has a similar Dashboard page, which also allows admins to add additional apps from third-party vendors via the Google Apps Marketplace.

Email

Office 365 provides Outlook Web App, which has a very familiar interface for users of the Outlook desktop app. Google Apps uses Gmail.

Calendar

Word processing

Spreadsheets

Presentations

Note that you cannot edit presentations with Google Apps, only view them.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

1. Atlanta
2. Dallas
3. Phoenix
4. Seattle
5. Denver
6. Boston
7. Washington, D.C.
8. San Francisco
9. Houston
10. Minneapolis

Microsoft is hardly the only one to draw up such as list. Forbes crowned some cities “Telecommuting Heavens” (go Albuquerque!), Money magazine did a list all the way back in 1997, and a company called CartridgeSave has drawn up international rankings for some reason. The general idea behind all of them seems to be to find places with excellent tech connections and community, good lifestyle and cheap living. But are these lists useful?

The affordability of a city is certainly an important consideration and objectively provable, but there are lots of lists of good value places to live online already. And for savvy pros willing to pay, good Internet connections are available nearly everywhere these days, except perhaps some very rural locations.

Lifestyle, meanwhile, seems pretty individual. Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would strap boards to their feet and subject themselves to freezing weather to hurtle down a hill, so the appeal of the Rocky Mountain ski havens is limited for me. Obviously, large swathes of the population would vehemently disagree. Heat or cold, slow moving or zinging with energy, surfer-friendly or musician-filled, our preferences in places to live make determining a single measure of lifestyle appeal difficult to impossible. Which is the whole point of web work: enabling individuals to escape from corporate determinations of which locations are best.

Is there such a thing as a good city for web work, or is the choice entirely personal?

Photo courtesy Flickr user DearEdward

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In the book I talk about one of the major oil companies. They equipped people with new, more portable devices and new smartphones and then the next day, 25 percent of people disappeared. So you’re a middle manager. You’re used to seeing people coming into the office and all of a sudden they vanish, and I think one of the key issues is middle managers learning how to manage when you see people far less than you ever used to. How often should you meet them? How do you keep an eye on them? Obviously, it brings up this whole issue of judging people on results and outputs rather than inputs.

Companies are starting to realize people are unused to this way of managing people. What they’re finding is that the biggest block to digital working is that middle managers aren’t skilled to do it. Organizations have learned that you actually do need to train managers in how to manage people in a virtual environment.

Miller went on to cite companies such as BT and Microsoft in the Netherlands, which have had improved success with virtual working after training their middle managers, so he’s certainly correct in his basic point that the training makes a difference, but is this news?

Five years ago, articles were already noting that when it comes to any sort of telecommuting, “the real impediment is the resistance of middle managers” and arguing that “more managers should be trained.” Back then Chuck Wilsker, president of the Telework Coalition, estimated that no more than 15 percent of firms were training managers for remote work. Based on Miller’s account, more companies have jumped on board, but certainly not as many as would be expected to have gotten with the program over half a decade. Perhaps the real story is how little progress has been made.

Why aren’t more companies training middle managers for the realities of the digital workplace despite repeated calls to send them to web work boot camp?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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The Internet provides companies with a great way to reach out for new ideas. But if you use the web to gather ideas, it’s also important to think about how you ask for them, and what you’ll then do with them. Idea generation — also known as ideation — is generally the first step in an organization’s innovation process.

Two ideation process examples

The TSA’s ideation process starts with a site called the IdeaFactory. Enabled in April of 2007, the site is described as being “created to empower TSA employees to suggest and promote ideas to improve their workplace and the way TSA does business.” Employees can post, rate and comment on ideas. The IdeaFactory team goes through the ideas, and then it processes those that are best suited to the agency’s strategic goals or are especially popular.

LG’s process is much more formal. External collaborators are asked to submit a proposal for a solution related to a theme or specific issue noted on the company’s Collaborate & Innovate site. LG provides a downloadable template asking about the team proposing the solution, the stage of technology development, intellectual property issues, etc. The LG Collaborate & Innovate team then evaluates the submissions and responds within four to eight weeks (a detailed description of the process is available here).

The TSA and LG examples are ongoing practices, but ideation can also be event-focused, such as IBM’s Innovation Jams.

Event-focused ideation

IBM has been “jamming” since 2001. Innovation Jams are focused online brainstorming and collaboration sessions held around a specific topic designed to spark innovation. The process has grown, and the company now offers it as a consulting service. As an indicator of the size of this process, in 2006, $100 million was granted to the top ideas generated by 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients (from 67 companies) and university researchers who participated in two 3-day phases, with contributions made 24 hours a day from 104 countries. (More about the Innovation Jam process.)

What makes ideation work?

Whether you use a single event or an ongoing process, the process you use to ask for ideas matters. Researchers recently had the opportunity to follow a grassroots innovation platform at Microsoft to identify design challenges and opportunities in the process. The researchers were able to track type of participation with platform, and through interviews with recent and top contributors and managers, dig deeper into participant motivations. They followed 1,491 users who made 2,211 votes, 488 comments and contributed 315 ideas around the topics of business problems in peer-to-peer advertising, identity-based system services and social computing. Overall, the researchers felt that participation was low, given that the organization had over 95,000 employees at the time.

As a result of their study, the researchers identified a variety of recommendations for increasing participation and overall value in the innovation process, but these three struck a chord with me:

• Foster meaningful participation. In the Microsoft study, only a small percentage of the corporate community participated in the pipeline. To improve participation, the researchers recommend incentives and clarification of how to balance regular work duties with contributions to the innovation process.
• Use business-relevant criteria in the voting process. Digg-style voting systems, as used in the Microsoft system, do not take business value into account, and the author’s passion for an idea may be diminished if too few votes are received. The researchers suggest that capping the number of votes a user can give, or asking users to rank ideas, can solve these problems.
• Support the process of innovation within the system. In the Microsoft example, the innovation platform is only used for a part of the idea pipeline, which means that users become unaware of the status of ideas as they move forward outside the system, leading to frustration. The platform also fosters the misconception that innovation is easy. Adopting a macro-level process of innovation in the system would allow the entire idea pipeline to be captured as it unfolds.

That last recommendation — to support the process of innovation within the system — is echoed in a comment by Edward Bevan, IBM’s vice president for technology and innovation programs, speaking about the IBM Jam process: “Idea generation is in some ways the ‘easy’ part — and darling star child — of innovation, whereas advancing, refining and building support for those ideas is the really tough part. . . .” Ideation needs follow-through to provide value.

Today’s top innovation management system vendors hope to facilitate ways of advancing, refining and building support for ideas — as well as idea generation. Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking with people from some of these vendors (first up, Brightidea) about how to best support innovation that comes from anywhere. Hint: It’s never just about the tool.

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Here’s a list of the features, products and technologies that are likely to be included in Windows 8 that I’m most looking forward to seeing:

1. Roaming profiles and cloud working. With the release of Office Web Apps, it was obvious that Microsoft had finally caught on that many of us are now working in the cloud. With Windows 8, integrated cloud features are coming to the desktop OS, too. According to some leaked presentations detailing updates for Windows 8, “Roaming profiles” will enable users to bring selected settings (like mouse, network and taskbar preferences) with them via the cloud just by logging into a machine with their “online” password, which will presumably be linked to a Windows Live account. This should offer a much more streamlined way to move between different computers (and mobile devices, as Windows 8 will also be available for tablets). When coupled with Office Web Apps and file storage via Windows Live Skydrive, this feature should mean being being able to log off from one machine, and then on logging into any other Windows 8 machine instantly being able to resume work, with all of your files, apps and settings available.
2. Portable Workspaces. Another feature that will help users to take their work with them, portable workspaces can put a runnable copy of Windows 8 onto a USB stick to boot any computer. It’s described in a leaked screenshot of a setup window as “a feature that allows you to run Windows from a USB storage device.” It sounds great, but there are a few caveats, however. Apparently you’ll need a USB stick with a hefty capacity (at least 16GB) to be able to use Portable Workspaces, and it will also only be available to Enterprise Edition customers. Additionally, I’m sure there will be many restrictions in place to stop users abusing the feature to make illegal copies of the OS.
3. Hybrid boot. Tired of sitting around, waiting around for a machine to boot up? Windows 8′s hybrid boot is a cross between a full system shutdown and hibernation. By hibernating selected core system files, startup time can be greatly shortened, typically reducing it to around 20 seconds, according to some reports.
4. Windows Store. Following Apple’s lead, Microsoft will include an app store with the new OS, possibly to be called Windows Store. I’m looking forward to this because an app store will make it easy to discover interesting and useful new apps, and also because an App Store and its potential revenues will encourage developers to spend time developing niche software that would probably otherwise have to be a labor of love, or released as shareware. It should also make for easier application updates, and also make it simple for users to install the same set of apps on other Windows machines. There is plenty of  interesting and useful software for the Mac in Apple’s App Store, so I’m really looking forward to seeing whether Microsoft’s version will provide similar choice for Windows 8.
5. Internet Explorer 10. After leaving neglecting its browser for years, Microsoft picked up its game with the release of IE9, which included a much snappier JavaScript processor and greatly improved support for web standards, and in particular the newer web technologies like HTML5, which modern web apps are beginning to rely upon. It’s likely that the browser that ships with Windows 8 will be IE10, which should build on the foundations laid with IE9 and offer even greater support for the newer web standards, which should lead to even richer web experiences for everyone.
6. Bundled PDF Reader. Another feature that’s following Apple’s lead, Windows 8 will come with its very own simple PDF reader. Dubbed Modern Reader, it is built using the new Windows 8 AppX technology, which means it should work in both desktop and mobile environments.
7. History vault. This is an automated backup utility that works in a very similar manner to Apple’s Time Machine. Users will be able to restore and edit documents from points in time via an easy-to-use graphical interface.
8. Skype integration. Finally, given Microsoft’s recent acquisition of popular VoIP provider Skype, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Skype features integrated into the OS.

What rumored Windows 8 features are you most looking forward to?

Windows logo courtesy Microsoft.

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“We are looking at the way cloud computing changes the way people work,” Soltero said in an interview. “With vSphere, we changed life for sysadmins and the way they looked at physical hardware. Cloud Foundry changed the way developers work, and now we want to change the way the end-user experiences his computing. Our strategy is expanding and taking shape with presentations being a core currency in business today.”

SlideRocket, a four-year-old startup that has raised $7 million in funding, offers its software to about 300,000 active users at the moment. It offers both a free version and a paid enterprise version, and Mitch Grasso, founder and CTO of SlideRocket, says sales of the paid version were growing 35 percent month-over-month. With the marketing muscle VMware can now put behind it, he expects conversion rates to increase. Grasso said for now, normal users won’t see any big changes, and he hopes to continue pushing features on the product to users now that it has more resources behind it, with mobile becoming a key area. The plan is to ensure people can view and create rich presentations on tablets and handsets.

As for VMware’s next buys, Soltero was cagey about what he perceived to be the holes in VMware’s application strategy. My hunch is an enterprise social networking product, which is becoming more and more important to enterprise customers, and perhaps an Excel-style spreadsheet or data platform might make sense. SlideRocket was backed by Azure Capital Partners and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and has 25 employees.

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With Office 365, Microsoft is taking aim squarely at Google’s cloud-based business productivity suite, Google Apps for Business. Both sets of tools appeal to the small business market, and offer similar “work anywhere” cloud functionality and an ecosystem of related tools through their marketplaces. Despite Google having had a considerable head start in this market and having a much larger ecosystem of partner apps in its marketplace, Microsoft has the advantage of a strong brand in Office, a comparatively powerful of set of online tools in Office Web Apps, and a huge installed userbase for its desktop apps. Businesses that have already invested heavily in Microsoft products for the desktop will likely find the familiarity of Office 365 appealing, particularly as it offers the functionality of Sharepoint and Exchange for a low monthly subscription fee without requiring any upfront investment in hardware, software licenses or staff.

Office 365 includes:

• Office Web Apps. Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
• Sharepoint Online. Intranet and collaboration tools.
• Exhange Online. Email and calendars.
• Lync Online. Unified communications, including IM and web conferencing.

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for the beta at the Office 365 site for a 25-user account (for businesses with more than 25 users, Microsoft offers enterprise plans, including dedicated support). Note that Microsoft currently anticipates the average wait for a new account from sign-up as being approximately two to four weeks during the beta period. When the beta ends, which is likely to happen later this year, users will have 30 days to decide whether to migrate to paid subscription, which should start at $6 per user per month. For comparison, Google charges $50 per user per year for Google Apps for Business, or around $4 per month.

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Back in 1975, BusinessWeek published “an in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office.” In the article, industry experts were divided over whether they would be able “to call up documents” from their files on-screen and connect electronic terminals to each other or if this vision of the future was, in fact, “scare talk.” One of the biggest concerns raised was how word processing would change the traditional secretary-executive relationship.

I think it’s safe to say that the predictions in the article put forward by George E. Pake , then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, were largely correct. According to Pake, in 1995, there would be a TV-display terminal with a keyboard sitting at his desk and he’d be “able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button … I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”

I have it on good authority from Jonathan Howell, Huddle’s CTO, that in the 1990s, everything was networked, all internal communication was done via email on a mainframe and desktop printers (with “desktop” referring to ubiquity rather than size) were commonplace. However, Jonathan was working for IBM in the 90s; what was it like for the rest of the workforce? You could indeed access your files with a click of a button on your computer. Networked desktop PCs were becoming increasingly widespread in offices worldwide, and in August 1995, Microsoft launched its much-anticipated Windows 95. The World Wide Web started to take shape, and Yahoo became one of the largest directories for web content. In short, advances in technology during the 1990s resulted in the “revolution in the office” that Pake predicted. Laptop computers were also becoming hot sellers, so the idea of a mobile workforce, while still a long way off, was starting to develop.

However, Pake’s vision of a world without “hard copy” remains a fantasy. In spite of the increasing popularity of email and the web, the rise of devices such as the iPad and enterprise content management tools, such as Huddle and SharePoint, the paperless office is still out of reach. The desktop printers that became a familiar sight in the office in the ’90s continue to be the worker’s trusty companion. According to the WWF, the average U.S. office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper per year. People still want to have physical documentation. Whether it’s business records, receipts or utility bills, people continue to feel they need to store paperwork in a safe, physical place for future reference. To drive widespread adoption of new technologies, a cultural shift and change in habits needs to take place. Just as the introduction of word processing and automation to the 1990s office changed the traditional secretary-executive relationship (or “office wife” bond), enterprise content management and collaboration technologies are disrupting the way people work today. Transforming working practices takes time.

In 1987, little more than 10 years after BusinessWeek’s predictions article was published, Apple Computer created a video envisioning how people would use technology to work in the 21st century:

The touchscreen “Knowledge Navigator” tablet device shown in the video could easily pass for an early prototype of Apple’s iPad, while the University Research Network accessed for information on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest looks suspiciously like the web. We are now accustomed to seeing touchscreen devices — according to market research firm iSuppli, worldwide production of touchscreen modules for use in computers is set to hit 117.9 million units in 2014 — but in 1987, mainstream adoption of such devices was still years away.

Another application shown is video conferencing: The professor is seen happily conversing with his colleague on-screen. Now, of course, video conferencing is part of most workers’ everyday lives, whether they are based at home or in an office: another hit for Apple’s vision of the future. While I doubt avatars with bow ties fielding calls and managing diaries will take off (unless Clippy 2.0 is overdue?), but virtual customer service assistants are now a familiar sight: Jenn at Alaska Airlines and Lucy at O2, for example. It may be a while before speech recognition is as seamless as that shown in the video; it is still a familiar (albeit often frustrating) technology.

The paperless office and a diary-managing avatar may not be a reality just yet, but many of the predictions made decades ago aren’t too far off the mark. However, there were some visions of the office of the future that just didn’t come to fruition, such as the short-lived Microsoft at Work (MAW). On June 9, 1993, Bill Gates launched MAW, which was supposed to connect common business machinery, like fax machines and photocopiers, with a communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers running Windows. It never got off the ground, and by 1995, it had disappeared from view.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

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The feature allows companies to write JavaScript code into their emails, turning them into small live widgets with up-to-date information. The update builds off Hotmail’s Active Views platform, which allowed e-mail users to see a preview of pictures or videos in an email. Microsoft said the advance is the next logical step for e-mail, as it evolves from text and rich HTML to JavaScript.

Currently e-mail users often receive HTML ads that direct users back to websites. But the information in the ads can often be out of date by the time a readers uses it, and the task of clicking through to a web site is enough to discourage some users. But by keeping it all in the e-mail, marketers can eliminate one hurdle in engaging users. For example, an Orbitz customer can start browsing for hotel choices from an e-mail. Completing the purchase will apparently still require a visit to Orbitz.com, but much of the hunting will occur in Hotmail.

Microsoft said other partners like Netflix and LinkedIn will also join the program soon, allowing people to manage their Netflix account or accept LinkedIn invitations from their inbox.

One of the problems that has kept this from happening in the past was security concerns over JavaScript. There has been no way in the past to run JavaScript code without isolating and allowing it to be used maliciously. But Microsoft said the Active Views platform is secure and allows protects users from potential attacks. Microsoft is reportedly only allowing trusted services to use this feature and will use OAuth to connect user inboxes to third-party services. This could be a major issue if Microsoft is proven wrong on this and consumers have their e-mails and their computers compromised. That will be one of the things Microsoft will likely monitor with its pilot program.

It’s unclear how much use non-Hotmail users will get out of this advance or how many companies will be allowed to leverage this tool. For now, only Hotmail users who sign up for interactive emails from the participating companies will receive them. But if Microsoft can prove this is a secure way to bring this functionality to e-mail users without opening them up for attacks, look for other e-mail providers to go down this route.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.):

• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
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PowerPoint embedding is pretty easy to do: Create a folder in your SkyDrive account and make sure that it’s set to be “viewable by everyone” in its permissions, then upload a document to to that folder. Hover your mouse cursor over the document and then click More->Share->Embed. Copy the embed code, as shown in the screenshot above, then paste it into your blog post or website. Here’s a quick example of an PowerPoint presentation from WWD guest author Oscar Avellaneda that I embedded via Office Web Apps:

Excel embeds work in a similar way. The really neat thing about documents that have been embedded on a site like this is that any changes that are made to the file in the SkyDrive account will also be reflected in the embedded file.

In addition to the new features, Office Web Apps is now also available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland. Office Web Apps can be accessed via office.live.com. It requires a free Windows Live account.

Let us know what you think of the updates to Office Web Apps below.

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• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
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The Tests

In order to test the browsers’ standards compliance, I used Acid3, which checks a browser’s ability with certain aspects of the web standards. The Acid3 test returns a score out of 100.

As you can see, while the IE9 beta is not quite as good as its main competitors in terms of standards compliance, its score of 95 is streets ahead of the old IE8, which only scored a lowly 20.

To test the speed of the browsers I used Kraken, Mozilla’s new JavaScript benchmarking tool, which attempts to test JavaScript performance using a series of tests that attempt to replicate realistic workloads. While benchmark tests results should always be taken with a pinch of salt as they can never exactly match real world conditions, they do at least provide an indicator of browser performance. The score returned by Kraken is the time it takes the browser to complete the tests, with a lower figure being better.

As you can see, IE9 is still lagging behind its competitors a little. However, it’s a vast improvement on the previous version. I haven’t included IE8 on this chart as when I tried to benchmark it, it wouldn’t make it through the Kraken tests without crashing. I did manage to get it to run through on an older Windows XP machine, and it scored an incredibly slow 348,056 ms. Even though the XP machine is slower than my test machine, that’s an order of magnitude worse than the new version, and shows just how much better IE9 is at handling complex JavaScript.

For a More Beautiful Web?

Microsoft’s tagline for the release of this new browser is, “Unleash a more beautiful web.” That might sound a bit overblown, but when you consider that IE’s market share is still hovering somewhere around 50 percent, the fact that the new release has much greater support for the newer web standards like HTML5 is significant.

Microsoft has obviously invested a lot of effort in getting IE up to scratch, and assuming it can get a reasonable proportion of the users of older versions of the browser to upgrade, IE9 should greatly accelerate the development of more powerful, feature-packed web apps. That’s because developers will be much more likely to develop sites that rely on complex JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3 if they know those features are broadly supported in the browser market. I’d hope that Microsoft would consider releasing IE9 for older versions of Windows, too, as that will help to ensure that a greater percentage of users upgrade.

While it would be very hard to argue that IE9 is superior to any of its competitors, it’s now in the same ballpark, at least. Microsoft has now joined the new browser wars: wars that are being fought on speed and capability with the newer web standards. That’s good news for everyone.

You can download the beta of IE9 from microsoft.com; it’s currently only available for Windows 7 and Vista.

Let us know what you think of IE9 in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps

The good news is that, in time for Windows 7′s first anniversary on October 3rd, Microsoft is bringing back the Family Pack. It’s the same deal as before — three upgrade licenses for $150, although you’ll probably be able to find it a bit cheaper online. If you haven’t already upgraded your machines to Windows 7, it’s definitely worth considering as, once again, it’s only available “while stocks last.” The Family Pack will also be sold in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia and “many other markets” on or after October 22nd to mark Windows 7′s first anniversary in those territories.

Have you upgraded to Windows 7 yet?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution