Microsoft has been making a lot of changes to its cloud services as of late. Just recently, the software giant renamed SkyDrive to OneDrive, along with giving the first 100,000 users who sign into the service 100GB of free storage space for a year. In addition, Microsoft gave away a lifetime free 3GB of storage for storing photos; this is called Camera Roll. However, the company is making more changes as it renamed its Office Web Apps services to Office Online.
This move to rename Office Web Apps is to make it easier for unaware users to realize that there's a free version of Office on the web that is similar, if not better than what Google is offering with Google Docs. Before now, the only way to gain access to Office Online apps was to either sign into Outlook.com, or OneDrive. The problem with those options is the services are hidden via the app bar, and not everyone knew the app bar even existed in the first place.
Speaking of the app bar, there's a new one this time around. Instead of just listing Outlook, OneDrive, People, and Calendar, the new app bar lists all the available services, making it easier to go directly to the needed service.
With the coming of Office Online via Office.com, Microsoft has created direct links to all available services, so nothing is no longer hidden from sight. The software giant has created a set of tiles of each service on the website that are similar in design to Windows 8.1, so PC users should also feel right at home.
Not everyone who uses Office Online knew there was an option to choose templates for the likes of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, Microsoft is now making it easier to find templates for each service. When a particular service is launched, users will no longer be greeted with a blank page; instead, users will see a "Let's Get Started" banner that allows the user to search OneDrive for previous documents, browse templates or open a blank page.
The changes Microsoft is making to its Office Online services right now is nothing grand, it's more of an effort to raise awareness.
At the moment, the new app bar is not available to every user, as Microsoft is still in the rollout phase.
