Here are the currently available options that will allow you to view and edit your Office documents on Apple’s tablet.

Mobile Office for iPhone, scaled up

While it is true that the existing Office app does not have a custom user interface for the iPad, the iPhone version of Microsoft’s Mobile App can be installed and run on the iPad with 2x video scaling. This may seem a little awkward at first, but you can gain access to all of the features offered on the iPhone version of the app.

While the Word document editor does not scale well by pinching and zooming using the iPad’s 2x video scaling, the Excel and PowerPoint editors do a much better job. You can zoom in an out of both Excel and PowerPoint documents to gain a better view of the document on the iPad.

If you are an Office 365 subscriber, the main advantage in using this versus the web versions of Office apps is that you can store and access your files for offline editing. Unfortunately the features available in the native iPhone app are a bit lacking when compared to their Web App versions.

Office Web Apps for mobile browsers

Microsoft’s free Office Web Apps work just fine within Safari on the iPad. Better, in fact, since they have many features the official iPhone app lacks. For instance, the editor for Word in the web version has more features than the iOS native version.  Features like being able to change the font, adjust the document’s margins, insert tables, and even change the selected text’s style.

The major problem using Microsoft’s web apps for Office is that you cannot access the apps, or any of the files for that matter, without an internet connection.  So you either have a more fully featured web app that requires internet access, or a lightweight native iPhone app that can work with your documents offline.

A minor annoyance is that when you run Office on the web from within Safari, you still have Safari’s toolbar as well as its tab bar present at the top of the screen. This is true even when adding a shortcut link to any one of Microsoft’s web apps on the home screen. Someone needs to inform Microsoft how to set the Apple-specific meta tag keys to enable full-screen mode in online Office. Until then, there are browser alternatives like Atomic ($1.99 Universal),  Mercury ($0.99, Universal) and Dolphin (Free, iPad) that will allow you to enter into full- screen browsing mode with a single tap. It works very much like the iPhone version of Safari that does support full-screen browsing, in landscape mode only.

SkyDrive app for sharing links

Microsoft only supports SkyDrive as a storage option for iOS users that access either the mobile or web app versions of Office. If you are using SkyDrive as your document repository, the dedicated SkyDrive (free, Universal) app for iOS supports viewing Office documents. You can even download the documents for viewing when you are not connected to the internet.

The one unique thing you can do from within the SkyDrive app is create links for sharing SkyDrive documents with others. Sharing links to documents can be a more effective means of sending documents as the URL can be passed along via private Twitter message, a Facebook message, or even an SMS text message.  The Office Mobile for iPhone app can only email the document as an attachment.

If you are only interested in viewing your Office documents on your iPad, there are alternatives that support more than just one SkyDrive account. GoodReader ($4.99, iPad) will allow you to connect to multiple SkyDrive accounts as well as Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Drive, Box, and any other WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP or SFTP server. While it may appear that an app like GoodReader is all you could ask for, keep in mind that the one thing it does not do is create a link to the document on SkyDrive to share with others.

Office² HD for tracking changes

What I believe is the best Office document solution available on the iPad today is Byte²’s Office² ($7.99, iPad). Like GoodReader, it offers online access to a wide variety of storage solutions. And like the web version of Microsoft’s Office apps, it supports a full set of editing features for all Office documents.  If you are either a DataViz DocsToGo Premium or a QuickOffice Pro HD user, you owe it to yourself to take a look at what Office² has to offer — it has many of the advanced features you are likely looking for.

One such feature is the ability to track changes when editing your Word documents. Being a native app, you can also download your documents and edit them offline. Office² also looks great on the iPad and gives you maximum screen real estate for editing. While you can email a document as an attachment like you can in the Office for iPhone app, you cannot share a link to your SkyDrive documents as you can in the native SkyDrive app for iOS.

You don’t need an Office 365 subscription to use Office² as a documents editor on your iPad.  This is similar to how things work with the documents you store on SkyDrive and edit while online with the free Web Apps for Office.  You only need a subscription if you want to use Microsoft’s  Office Mobile for iPhone app to edit your documents offline.

Apple costs for Office

For Apple users, when you do sign up for an Office 365 account, you only get access to the previously available Office 2011 for Mac.  Chances are you already have this version installed on your Mac.  What you do not get is access to the Office on Demand feature that allows you to download full versions of the office suite onto any Mac you may be using; this feature is for Windows only.  Since you can still pick up a 3- install, 3-user, never-expiring license of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac on Amazon for $125, it hardly seems worth it to start spending the current annual subscription rate of $99 per year for exactly the same product.

For now at least, the best solution for viewing and editing your Microsoft Office documents on your iPad is to use GoodReader if you just want to view your files, and Office² if you want to edit them.  The only Microsoft app that you may need to install on your iPad is the native SkyDrive app, as it is the only way to share links to documents that you have stored on your SkyDrive account.  In a nutshell, Microsoft’s Office 365 just is not quite ready for the Apple platform.  Not yet at least.

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First-party applications such as Bing, Skype and Xbox Live come into the equation by demonstrating the ability to run with minimal failures at a large scale. It’s no Google search, but at least Microsoft can claim 17.6 percent share in search marketshare in the United States, Nadella said. Proof for public-cloud know-how also stems from widespread business use of house-run applications such as Office 365.

Nadella made the argument that since Microsoft can run all of these applications, its infrastructure is indubitably flexible enough to handle whatever companies want to throw at the Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Of course, that public cloud savvy filters down to intelligence companies can use on premise to run public clouds on SQL Server, Nadella said.

So given all of these capabilities, how does Microsoft shape up on the horsemen question? On software, Nadella called out Google, Salesforce.com, and itself. On public-cloud infrastructure, he named Amazon, Google and Microsoft. And when it comes to taking infrastructure for their own public clouds and making it available for others, such as service providers and large enterprises, to build their own public clouds, his scorecard shows Amazon, VMware and, yes, Microsoft.

“The one name common across those three is Microsoft,” he said.

The trouble is, it’s still early in the public-cloud game, with adoption still gaining steam and with issues like privacy lying ahead that could throw it all off.

And that dominance is certainly taking its toll on the gear market. Nadella noted that Microsoft relies on lesser-known server makers such as Quanta along with big OEM contenders. Even so Om offered that major cloud providers such as Microsoft are leaving Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM as “roadkill.”

“I didn’t say that — those are your words,” Nadella said.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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That’s the problem Gord Mangione, the former Microsoft exec in charge of SQL Server before moving on to XenSource and Citrix, is attacking with Tipbit, his Seattle-based startup that’s emerging from stealth this week. For Mangione, the tipping point was search. He could never find what he needed on his device — not on his current iPhone and not on the Blackberry he used before. That inability to find what he wanted fast led inexorably to Tipbit, which has about $2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and employees.

“Data is locked in different apps and the amount of email I can store locally is insufficient. All I do on my phone is read mail, delete the messages I don’t care about and wait to get to my ‘real’ machine to do anything useful in business,” Mangione said in a recent interview. The problem now is that the smartphone has become that “real” machine. And it’s of limited utility because, in Mangione’s words, “search remains terrible and I’m constantly switching between apps to find what I want. Why is the calendar, contacts and email all separate on an iPhone? Why can’t it all be in a single app?”

He’s hoping that Tipbit will be that single aggregation point to serve up what you need about your next meeting, your last email, quickly and unobtrusively. Users can keep using Gmail but have to allow Tipbit on grant it read-only access (via OAth authentication) to their various LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts. From all that information, Tipbit creates a private index in the cloud, accessible only by you.

“To make this work we have to index –but not store — your email,” Mangione said. Once that’s done, you can, with a single swipe option, bring up all the relevant information for an upcoming event. If you’re about to meet with Bill Gates, for example, you can pull up all the messages relevant to that meeting, what he’s been tweeting about, what his LinkedIn profile says, Google searches about him, all in one place.

“Back at Microsoft before we met with press, PR would hand us a backgrounder with all the information about that reporter — what they covered, what they last wrote etc. This is the same idea,” Mangione said.

Right now, Tipbit is for iPhone only and folks can use it for free — without fear of ads. The idea is once folks start using Tipbit in a business context,  to start charging the company for that use.

About two months ago, the company decided to go “hardcore on mobile only,” Mangione said because that’s where the action is.

He cited figures that showed that two years ago 55 percent of all messages were read on a desktop machine. Fast forward to last month when 23 percent of all messages opened were read on iPhones alone. And less than 20 percent were read on Microsoft Outlook.

There are other tools out there to help make sense of the iPhone firehose. Sunrise, for example, just updated its iOS calendar app to integrate Foursquare, Crunchbase and other site info, but the idea behind the more business-focused Tipbit is to bring in calendar, news, email and other data all into one place.

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In fact, government access to data in clouds could be blown wide open if the FBI gets its way in passing certain legislation. But that could be in the future. For now, actually, the workloads running on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds could be harder to get at than data inside higher-level consumer-cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

SaaS customers concerned

Elad Yoran, CEO of cloud-security startup Vaultive, said he has fielded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of inquiries since the PRISM news hit about how companies using SaaS programs can protect their data.

“I don’t think there’s a company out there that will consider Google or Office 365 without asking themselves the question about unauthorized — from their perspective — disclosure to the government and whether they’re willing to take the risk that their data is sitting unencrypted in a database, out of their control,” Yoran said.

Yoran isn’t sure just how much the use of such services — or any public cloud, for that matter — will fall off and go back on premise, but it’s clear to him that companies are thinking about these issues now. He recommends the companies using SaaS applications keep their data encrypted when it’s in transit, at rest and in use.

The thing about SaaS is that companies sign up to run on them, and the SaaS providers — take Google with its email, for example — can just provide access in response to government requests without needing to consult with the customer. In fact, the PATRIOT Act specifically prohibits speaking up about these requests.

Why IaaS is different

Compare this with PaaS or IaaS, and the situation is different. Narrowing down to the virtual machine the data about an individual end-user federal agents want to learn about could be quite a task, if it is even possible. “In the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space it’s not possible,” said Jason Hoffman, chief technology officer at IaaS provider Joyent. “It couldn’t even provide a data feed on the backend that exposes people’s data. It just doesn’t work that way.” To put it another way, AWS doesn’t know what’s happening on its servers and doesn’t have access to those virtual machines any more than Hewlett-Packard knows how a customer is using its Moonshot servers.

There’s also a legal element to this. The third-party doctrine lets the government ask a SaaS company such as, say, Pinterest for information on end users, but when the SaaS app is running on hardware owned by an unrelated cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the government can’t get that same data directly through AWS.

Regardless of whether these data grabs can and do happen, the idea of it happening might be enough to scare off cloud customers and strengthen the story for on-premise infrastructure. As my colleague Derrick Harris noted earlier this week, in an increasingly cloudy business world that might not be the best thing for the economy.

While companies have been experimenting with development and testing work and some larger workloads on IaaS from AWS and other providers, complete dependence on public-cloud infrastructure is still way off, and the PRISM news puts more of a damper on the use of it, said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs.

“When I talk to customers about why they don’t use public cloud, … a lot of it is fear,” Kanies said. That fear often stems from uncertainty on legal and other implications of processing and storing data on shared infrastructure. And uncertainty on public cloud translates to staying on premise.

This argument applies not only to companies based in the United States; those based elsewhere surely will want to dodge the sort of data mining that U.S. intelligence agencies apparently conduct.

“Nearly every other country in the world is working hard to prevent its citizens’ data from being given to the NSA,” Kanies said. The European Union’s data-protection rules are a case in point, and the PRISM revelations will only fuel the fire on this front.

Altogether, Kanies said, “I would go so far as to say I would expect to see much lower adoption of public infrastructure owned by American companies. My guess is Europe is not going to trust American companies at all, regardless of whether it’s going to be hosted here or not.”

Kanies isn’t alone in expressing these sorts of sentiments. GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum in recent days predicted blowback on the international front, too:

The rise of cloud computing in the European Union will see the greatest impact on this scandal. The group is already suspicious of the U.S. government’s power to either monitor or outright seize their data. While there may not be any direct logical connection behind the perceived risk, the truth is people often make decisions, such as moving to the public cloud, based on feelings as much as facts.

Just another talking point

Then again, the news on PRISM might turn out to be nothing more than another proving point for public-cloud naysayers to exploit, bringing minimal actual impact.

Mark Thiele, executive vice president of data center technologies at colocation and cloud provider Switch, doubts the PRISM news will affect the total market opportunity of public-cloud use by any more than 3-5 percent. And that estimate might be generous.

“Those people that are convinced that the public cloud is the right place to do certain things in are going to continue to do it, and it’s (the PRISM program’s existence) not going to scare anyone away,” Thiele said. The difference in expenditures speaks for itself, and concerns about keeping data out of the government view won’t necessarily outweigh the financial and operational benefits of running in public or even hybrid clouds.

Private-cloud snooping

The gee-whiz factor that could throw off this whole equation is what the U.S. government might do to guarantee access to company data, including that which is kept on premise, in the future.

The FBI has thought about mandating forced access to encrypted data as part of an enhancement of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the New York Times reported last month.

Should that come to pass, there’s a chance data kept behind a firewall in an on-premise data center would become much easier for the U.S. intelligence community to access, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Depending on how the legislation is phrased, yes, it would be (possible),” Galperin said. “It would be tremendously dangerous. It would be the end of private internet communications.”

For now, it looks like the legislation might not go that far. Rather, an expansion of the act would ask companies for assistance in relinquishing data to the federal government or impose fines.

That climate could have long-term effects, not only on the growing shared-infrastructure camp but on others, too. Entrepreneurs could move abroad, so they don’t have to comply with such stringent regulations in the name of national security. They would rather build great products quickly than devote lots of staff time to compliance.

The political question in the end is whether national security outweigh economic and technological advancements.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Bruce Rolff.

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Can your dog help advance the Internet of Things? Ben Jacobs of Whistle thinks so and explains to Stacey Higginbotham how vets, researchers and pet owners can take advantage of data from devices worn by pets.

Lastly, our GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast recaps seven years of blogging as GigaOM celebrates another birthday. There’s more information on the PRISM saga and even a little gaming news: Did Sony turn the tables on Microsoft at this year’s E3 gaming convention?

(Download the GigaOM Chrome Show)

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Bearing the rather clunky name of “Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers”, the app does require a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud service, but the fundamentals are present: you can use it to access, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on an iPad or iPhone — although the app is optimized for the iPhone 5, so don’t expect a tablet-friendly experience.

According to the product blurb:

“Documents look like the originals, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes. When you make quick edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and content remain intact.”

The app can be used on Office documents received as email attachments, or those stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint. If your desktop Office 2013 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud, you can also pull up documents that were recently viewed there, from your mobile device.

It is possible to edit documents while offline. The app is compatible with iPhone 4 and up, and with the 3rd generation iPad and up (and yes, with the iPad mini too). Devices have to run iOS 6.1 or later.

It doesn’t seem the rollout is global just yet, though. My iPad mini, which is set to the U.K. App Store, isn’t seeing it at the time of writing. No sign of an Android version, either.

UPDATE (5am PT): Microsoft has now published a blog post explaining the functionality in greater detail.

NOTE: This article originally bore the headline “Microsoft quietly pushes out Office for iPhone and iPad”. A few minutes after posting the “… and iPad” was excised because, while the app will work on iPads, it’s not optimized for them.

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So, in theory, apart from having advance notice to patch their own systems, those agencies could exploit that zero-day vulnerability to hack into your data, before Microsoft gives you a chance to patch the flaw. And it’s not just Microsoft. According to the report, “thousands of [U.S.] technology, finance and manufacturing firms” are closely aligned with American national security agencies, passing them information such as vulnerability details and hardware and software specifications, and giving them access to overseas facilities and data.

In return, Bloomberg claims, the agencies give the companies information about foreign attacks on their systems. Google is cited as an example of this, with Sergey Brin allegedly having been invited to sit in on a secret intelligence briefing after an attack by Chinese hackers in 2010. Of course, the companies aren’t the only sources of useful flaws — security expert and activist Christopher Soghoian detailed late last year how some security researchers sell vulnerability information to governments for large sums of cash too. “This is the [U.S.] government buying a flaw without the intention of fixing it,” Soghoian explained in his Harvard University presentation. (Thanks to Jeff Ausloos for alerting me to that one.)

Backbone hacking

The Bloomberg report also notes claims recently made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. hacks network backbones in China and Hong King. Although the evidence for this “Blarney” program appears scantier than that for PRISM, the gist is that the scheme captures metadata from internet-connected devices such as computers and smartphones around the world, including OS version, Java software version and browser. Again, this would make it easier for the agencies to target and hack such devices.

On the domestic front, the piece also claims a security system called Einstein 3, which is meant to protect U.S. government systems, can “expose the private content of the emails under certain circumstances.”

Who’s the customer?

But it’s the claims about U.S. tech vendors and their apparently voluntary information exchange with the country’s spy agencies that will most bother governments and their public sector organizations around the world.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw seemingly confirmed this cooperation in the Bloomberg article, saying the early release of vulnerability information helps to give the U.S. government an “early start” in protecting its systems. Other “trusted partners” reportedly include Intel’s security business McAfee, which apparently acts as a consultant of sorts to spy agencies wanting to know more about network architectures around the world.

There’s no suggestion that any of this data-sharing is illegal – but for many governmental customers around the world it will suggest that their vendors have undisclosed interests that don’t align with their own. For some in the U.S. tech industry, these revelations may turn out to be as damaging as PRISM, if not more so.

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For now, the companies are prohibited from releasing such information.

It’s clearly a PR offensive on behalf of the web and software giants, hoping to distance themselves from revelations that the three companies and others have participated in the FBI and National Security Agency’s PRISM program first reported last week.

It’s still unclear just how the program gained access to external data and what participating companies have done to enable this sort of access. But regardless of that, the perception of complicity is something Google and the rest must fight. Whether or not the federal government complies with requests for more transparency almost doesn’t matter. The companies need to at least look like they want to shed light on their involvement and the extent of the data mining. And the letters achieve that goal.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user ARTSILENSE.

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There has been a free tier of the AWS service for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Amazon Linux or other “unpaid” versions of Linux for some time, but SUSE and Red Hat did not fall into that category. Now Red Hat Linux, which has become the Linux standard for most corporations, is part of the free tier. Users can get 750 hours of free Red Hat usage, but here’s some fine print: 

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer or if the new account is included in Consolidated Billing. You will be charged standard rates for use of AWS services if we determine that you are not eligible for the Offer.

It will be interesting to see if this move shifts the composition of operating system share on EC2. According to the Cloud Market, Ubuntu makes up over half of all AMIs running in AWS. “Other” Linux,which is presumably Amazon or other unpaid Linux, is at 23.2 percent; Windows at 8.4 percent and then there’s Red Hat at 5 percent (see chart).

This just the latest example of cloud coopetition. Red Hat is working on its own flavor of an OpenStack cloud, still in preview but likely to become generally available this week at the Red Hat Summit. It is tailored for enterprise users and would challenge AWS for those the enterprise workloads that Amazon so clearly wants.

There may be a micro battle raging between the various flavors of Linux but the war lies ahead  as companies from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, HP and Red Hat fight to make their respective clouds the destination for corporate workloads.

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This tidbit comes courtesy of app developers, who of course are now able to play with the preview of iOS 7 ahead of its consumer launch later this year. A Yandex spokesman subsequently confirmed the inclusion to me.

Here are tweets from devs in Russia:

Яндекс в iOS7 http://t.co/wnJMn2bqWr—
ʎɐsʇɐd ʎdɯnɹƃ (@alexmak) June 11, 2013

… And Turkey:

iOS 7 supports yandex search on Safari

@YandexComTr @yandex @YandexDestek http://t.co/0zCwTU5Oj2—
Bahaeddin Nakiboglu (@bahaeddin) June 10, 2013

Turkey is a particularly big win for Yandex, which is pushing hard into that country. As for the company’s more traditional markets, the inclusion of Yandex search as an option in Safari could even be seen as belated – the company has a majority share of the Russian search market, and a few months ago it even ranked higher than Microsoft’s Bing for numbers of searches on a global basis.

Yandex has already been supplying data for local users of Apple Maps since September last year.

Around the world, Google is the default search option for Apple’s customers. Bing and Yahoo are also global options. Not many local players get to join that list – although China’s Baidu is a notable exception in that country.

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