First published on CloudBlogs on Nov, 06 2014

Three words: Office on Android

Wow!!! Last week, after several weeks of hinting at some big “events,” we made two big announcements: The first one confirmed the General Availability (GA) dates for the upcoming Intune updates, as well as the updates for the Office for iPad apps. The second one announced that Office 365 will now have MDM natively instrumented by integrating a subset of Microsoft Intune. Today’s announcement is Game Changer #3 : A beautiful, unmistakably Office experience on the Android Tablet. You can watch my detailed discussion of this on today’s new episode of The Endpoint Zone . Questions about when Office is coming to Android has been one of the most common questions I’ve received from family, friends and customers over the past few months. Everyone wants that incredible Office experience on all their devices – and now that’s possible. This news comes on the heels of our recent announcements about new Office apps for the iPhone, updates to the Office for iPad, and confirmation that new, touch-optimized Office apps for Windows 10 are in the works. There are currently more than 1B users of Microsoft around the world, and, with these recent announcements, those 1B (and constantly growing!) can use Office across all their devices.

Why is this Game Changing in Enterprise Mobility Management?

Workers using Android tablets and iPhones have had to settle for poor experiences for far too long. The experiences they’ve been getting from other EMM vendors attempting to deliver Office capabilities have simply fallen short. Really short. No longer. With these recent announcements, organizations can now deliver the Office experience to all their users, across all their devices. Looking at the very near future, there is good reason to get really excited:

• Office for iPad apps managed by Microsoft Intune and the Enterprise Mobility Suite are coming in the next few months.
• The Office for iPhone apps will also be manageable by Intune when they are updated in 2015.
• When the Office for Android apps are released in early 2015, they will also be enlightened to be manageable by Intune.

This deep level of management offered for the Office mobile apps ( e.g. the ability to control where files can be saved, as well as sharing data with the Office mobile apps in a managed environment) will require Intune as the MDM/MAM solution. The reason is simple and practical: The work we have done to integrate these apps with Azure Active Directory and Intune is massive and intensively thorough. I am really proud of the work the team has done to bring together this end-to-end solution. I am going to write about this deep integration over the next couple of months in a series focused on architecture. As you start to use these Office apps, I think you’ll appreciate the fact that we have done the technical integration, as well as the operations, customer service, and customer escalation. Bottom line : We have thought about and built this end-to-end, and we’re delivering an incredible integrated experience that is not replicable anywhere else. But enough talk – here are what the Office for Android Tablet apps look like! Word for Android Tablet Excel for Android Tablet PowerPoint for Android Tablet