Microsoft's Office 2010 package is now available as a technical preview for selected users, and the latest update sees the market-leading office productivity suite offering the ability to edit documents online through the Web Applications feature.

With adoption of Google Docs on the increase, according to a recent survey by analyst IDC, the pressure on Microsoft to move its productivity applications online is increasing.

Consumers will be able to use Office applications free through Windows Live accounts with 25GB of SkyDrive storage to hold the documents. Enterprises can roll out the feature through SharePoint.

Computing spoke to Microsoft's Office Live product manager, Tim Kimber, about the state of the web applications being rolled out in the new preview, and how enterprises would use the technology.

What applications will be available online and what features are currently available?

Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word are the four available, but currently you'll only be able to create and edit documents with Excel and PowerPoint. You'll be able to view documents stored online with all four applications, but the co-authoring feature has only been enabled with Excel - that's the application our customers told us was the most important to them, so that's the application we enabled co-authoring on first.

Will SkyDrive eventually move over to Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing environment ?

It's sitting on the Windows Live server farm, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it moved over to Azure.

What percentage of the features in the PC-based package will eventually be available online?

I don't think we had a specific percentage in mind. It gives you the basic functionality, and in Word you'll eventually be able to edit tables, images and so on, that sort of thing, but remember the idea is not to try to move the desktop client version online.

Which people are you unveiling this to?

In the UK it will just be available to a handful of journalists, but it has gone out to a large number of people in the US and Japan – I'd say a few thousand worldwide.

What is the difference between the standard Web Application and the versions associated with Windows SharePoint?

You'd be saving documents to your SharePoint infrastructure on your own servers and you'd have full control – if you were an IT administrator – to set up anything you wanted.

The Web Apps will be the same whether on Microsoft Online or your own on-premises SharePoint environment, but it's the wrapper we put around it that makes the difference. You'll have full Active Directory integration and you'll be able to set all your policies for SharePoint and your servers generally. So you will have complete control over who and where documents are saved, so you won't have them proliferating all over the internet.

That's what IT managers of our customers have told us is absolutely critical, they want control of where documents can propagate and also what security procedures will be in place.

Compared to Google Apps, what do you think the functionality will be? Have you just tweaked it to give a better feature set?

We're talking about this as "software plus services" – we don't envisage people using this as their primary method of word processing or for use as a spreadsheet. This is the ability to carry on working as usual, but also get hold of documents in internet cafés on your mobile – or other people's documents [using co-authoring].

Web Applications will allow you to access your data anywhere and carry on working wherever you are. We're not going for a software-as-a-service play – we're all about software plus services, and giving customers the freedom of choice to work wherever they work. I don't think a direct comparison is appropriate here because we're approaching this from a different angle – allowing people to work from wherever they are.

How much back-end processing power do I have access to when online - for example if I have a large Excel spreadsheet that needs some of the values re-calculating?

You can upload a file, say an Excel spreadsheet, up to the limit of 50MB. The processing power in SkyDrive is suitable for supporting consumer/small business scenarios for data manipulation. In other words, for fairly straightforward data manipulation. But if a customer is looking to use cloud processing for large data sets in a business scenario, we’d be looking more at an Excel Services-based solution, which is part of SharePoint Server.

What's the roadmap for Office 2010 availability?

The public beta will be available inside this calendar year, we're pretty firm about that, and all the engineering is on track for that. General availability will be the first half of 2010.

If the Web Applications feature succeeds, is Microsoft's back-end infrastructure robust enough to cope with a large amount of users?

Yes, we're building our server farm out on a daily basis, which is why we're doing a technical preview and then a beta. This allows us to stress test our back-end systems.

Currently, we have no concerns about our systems. Windows Live SkyDrive is a very rugged application, it's got millions of users uploading a lot of files – you can upload a 50MB file in SkyDrive with no problems at all, and we’re not anticipating any issues.

With SkyDrive you get a 25GB workspace – that’s virtually unlimited in most people's language.