Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Love using apps on your smart phone? Wish you could use them on your PC or tablet? The Microsoft Office team has granted your wish. With the recent launch of their Customer Preview, the Office team announced that developers can now build a new class of apps for the new Office and SharePoint. This means that, for the first time, developers can easily customize Office and SharePoint using familiar languages and open Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET and PHP.

Developers can also share the apps they build with the 1 billion Office users worldwide, and sell them in the Office Store opened last week. Developers keep 80% of the proceeds from the sale of an app, while Office keeps 20% themselves. Richard Riley, Director of Product Management for SharePoint, says these updates represent “some of the most significant changes on the developer side of Office in the last 15 years."


 
We’re already seeing developers take advantage of this new cloud application model, with the Office Store filling up with apps for Excel, Word, Outlook and SharePoint. What apps would you like to see in the store? Let us know in the comments.