AppleInsider Staff
Apple on Wednesday announced a new iWork feature that allows both Mac and iOS users to collaborate on a variety of Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents in real time.
Announced and demonstrated onstage at today's special event by Apple VP of Product Marketing Susan Prescott, the iWork collaboration feature is available for iPhones, iPads and Macs. Users running Windows can also work with colleagues via a web interface.
In practice, iWork syncs document changes across devices which, depending on whether collaboration mode is set to public or private, show up on another user's screen. Collaborators can easily distinguish who is modifying a spreadsheet, word processing file or presentation, as user input is displayed in different colors.
The addition arrives as a competitor to existing productivity software suites including the web-based Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365, both of which have boasted collaboration features for years. Apple, late to the game, is pushing the education angle, touting use case scenarios like teacher-to-student and student-to-student collaboration.
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
16 Comments
Trying to catch up with (gasp!) Microsoft? And it looks like cross-platform means different things to different companies... Oh yeah, posted from my iMac.
I used Pages a ton. I'm happy to see the continued major updates.
This is incredibly and indispensably awesome for a lot of people who need this in corporations and schools.
No need to work separately and then merge. You can do it all live and in real time.
With excellent web support, this can be done using any platform with a modern web browser. (Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, Chrome book, Mac OS, iOS, Android etc...)
This greatly raises the bar for free iWorks in the corporate world and schools on most platforms and in most languages.
This is pretty cool - wish I had a need for it. Word/page processors have always intrigued me, but I never once had a job that demanded their use on anything but an irregular basis. Seems to me, email has pretty much negated the need for dedicated writing programs for most people.