Microsoft and Facebook team up for Cloud initiative

Microsoft and Facebook have launched the beta version of Cloud-based Docs for Facebook, an online applications platform that lets Facebook users create and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
The announcement of partnership coincide with the opening of Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco

This move will strengthen competition in the cloud-based productivity arena, where Microsoft finds itself in competition against Google,IBM, VMare and a growing host of smaller competitors.

"Built on Microsoft Office 2010, the Docs app enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know," Lili Cheng, director of Microsoft's FUSE Labs, wrote April 21 on the FUSE Labs blog.

Cheng wrote, "The fact that we've been able to adapt the Office 2010 'Web Apps' technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system's rich 'contextual collaboration' capabilities."

It took four months for the FUSE (Future Social Experiences) Labs team to deliver the beta, from concept to implementation, according to Cheng,

Users can navigate to Docs.com and log in using Facebook Connect. From that point, a variety of options present themselves: Users can view documents being shared by their friends, or else create or upload a document. Once a document's been created and edited, it can be shared with any Facebook friends selected via an interface on the right-hand side of the screen. The application also includes granular controls for which friends can edit a document.

FUSE was created in 2009 and represent a series of initiatives that form a company-wide refocusing on cloud computing about which Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer publicly announced in the speech to University of Washington computer science students. The main focus of the labs is to focus on software and services that are centered on social activity, real-time experiences and rich media. According to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie FUSE brings more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they're already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with "leapfrog" efforts.