Microsoft to Launch Office Store

The App Store mania will catch the most popular computing windows—Microsoft’s Office and SharePoint. In the next version of these applications, Microsoft will offer an app store.

The company has a reason for opening the store—about 100 crore people use Office application globally.

When you get an address or reference in an email, you need not go to another application to seek more details about the people or organizations mentioned in that address or reference.

You can, say, check their details (say, Linkedin profile) or their sales history without having to move out of the mail window.

Microsoft will soon open an App Store exclusively to cater to the needs of upcoming Office and Sharepoint.

It has invited developers to develop relevant apps that can be put on the store. Popular networking sites such as LinkedIn is among the first firms to put its application in the Store.

Throwing light on Office Store, the ‘best kept secret' in the next Office and SharePoint version, Vivek Narasimhan, David Mowatt and Humberto Lezama, said: “This is an exciting time to be an Office or SharePoint developer! If you haven’t had a chance to download the Office 2013 Preview or explore the new world of apps for Office and SharePoint at the developer centre, do so right away.”

“While you can read about the details of the Office Store on the developer centre, we want to give you a tour of how we think about the value of the store for both our user and developer communities," they said.

Why we built the Office Store, Vivek asks?

For three reasons: integration, simplicity and developer opportunity.

“We know our users spend an incredible amount of time using the Microsoft Office suite—think of how much time you spend reading through email, writing reports, analysing data, preparing sales figures or sharing proposals with your team,” he says.

But many of these critical tools and many critical information sources live on the web or in applications outside of Office.

“We’ve built the store so you could integrate the very best of the web with the powerful features of Office and SharePoint,” he points out.

The app developers can monetize their apps. Microsoft could retain 20 per cent of the transactions.