Microsoft allows real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents in Dropbox, Box

Last year Microsoft announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSSP) and enabled cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. Now Microsoft is adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services, extending their Office for iOS integration to all partners in the CSPP, enabling integration between Outlook.com and cloud storage providers Dropbox and Box. Real-time co-authoring with Office Online documents stored in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online was already available since 2013. By extending this capability to cloud storage providers in the CSPP, this feature is now available for users whose documents are stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Also, any other partner in the CSPP program can enable real-time co-authoring using standard interfaces. Microsoft also announced that in addition to Dropbox, they will offer all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS. This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as ‘places’ in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and DropBox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with the assurance that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. Microsoft will follow with other mobile platforms later this year. This integration is now also available with Box—with partners including Citrix ShareFile, Edmodo and Egnyte coming soon.