Edit Away, No Sign-In Needed With Microsoft SkyDrive And Office Web Apps

A new feature from Microsoft allows people to share and edit documents from SkyDrive in Office Web Apps without the recipient having to sign in to their Microsoft account.

When a user shares an edit link from their account, all the recipients may edit it as well.

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A user can still require people to sign in to view or edit a document, which we’d expect. But the simple viewing and editing capability goes a long way in making the Office service a lot more usable.

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I wish I could say the same thing about Google Docs, which still makes it a task to share and edit documents with people by requiring them to sign in.

Finally, chest thumping time – Microsoft is ballyhooing that a billion documents are now on SkyDrive. Well, we know that for every document shared, at least one copy is made. So the true number is the big question mark. We’ve asked Microsoft and await their wise reply.