Microsoft Corp has launched a series of free online extensions to its Office productivity suite, dubbed eServices, which gives clues to the direction that the software company is looking to extend the software in the future. The new eServices are aimed at the consumer and small business market, allowing free language translation services, web-based data storage and unified messaging.
Lisa Gurry, product manager for Microsoft Office said that in the future Microsoft will look to add collaboration services, such as online document sharing and real time collaboration to the services available. These will become available as more companies start to support Microsoft’s Office Server extensions, she said. 19 companies have currently implemented the Office Server Extensions. So far, 1,000 companies have implemented Microsoft’s FrontPage web publishing server extensions and Gurry expects that the Office Server extensions will garner the same kind of support.
Additional eServices will also enable Microsoft to beef up its web-hosted version of the suite, Office Online, over time. It ties in quite well…we think that there’s a great interaction between the two. Gurry said. The free services currently being offered include fax and voice mail services from eFax, online automatic translation from Lernout & Hauspie, up to 256Mb of hosted storage from Driveway and FrontPage-based web creation services.
