Microsoft Announces MS Office For iPad As Part Of “Mobile First, Cloud First” Approach

iPad-toting mobile warriors rejoice. If you’re missing the functionality of your Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Microsoft has just made them official for your iPad. As part of Microsoft’s mobile- and cloud-focused event hours ago in San Francisco, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced Office For iPad, extending the functionality of its suite of applications you’ve gotten used to on your desktop and other tablet devices to the popular Apple product.

If you’re already an Office 365 subscriber, you can simply add an iPad as one of your chosen devices included in your subscription benefits, and will be able to create and edit documents with Word for iPad, PowerPoint for iPad and Excel for iPad. These apps are now available as free downloads from Apple’s App Store. They join other iPad-optimized productivity applications such as OneNote, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Bing, Lync, Outlook Web Access, Yammer and Skype, and is especially integrated with Microsoft’s OneDrive (previously SkyDrive) and OneDrive for Business, its multi-platform content storage solution.

“Microsoft is focused on delivering the cloud for everyone, on every device. It’s a unique approach that centers on people — enabling the devices you love, work with the services you love, and in a way that works for IT and developers,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer for Microsoft, at the event.

Nadella also announced the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), a comprehensive set of cloud services to help businesses manage corporate data and services on the devices people use at work and at home. The solution gives businesses comprehensive device, identity and access management complete with data protection from the cloud, and includes modules such as Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services, to give IT departments the tools they need to help protect corporate assets and enable people to work on the devices they personally prefer.

Such functionality was previously already available, but EMS looks to be Microsoft’s way of bundling the various products together and offered at a better price.