Update: Surprisingly (to me), this new Excel Live capability is not built on the Fluid service at all, a spokesperson said. Even though Fluid Framework/Fluid Relay is all about super-fast/near real-time coauthoring, Microsoft is enabling the new collaboration in Excel Live in some other unspecified way. Update No. 2: Actually, as I had guessed, Excel Live IS built on the Fluid Framework technology. Glad I double-checked what others were telling other publications. Update No. 3 (July 22): Third answer is hopefully the charm. Excel Live is NOT based on Fluid Framework, officials said correcting some previous erroneous communications. A spokesperson sent me the following via email today: “Excel Live is not built on Fluid Framework. Rather, it uses similar underlying technology that offers the same type of real-time sync and co-authoring functionality that Fluid enables.” As to when and if this kind of improved collaboration will come to OneNote, Word, etc., the official answer, from a spokesperson: “We will continue building live collaboration capabilities into our first party portfolio and you can expect to see more from us later this year. We’ll share more around the roadmap and timelines in the future.” In other Teams-related news at Build, Microsoft also announced the new Video Clip feature coming to Teams Chat that will let users record, send and view short videos. Video Clip is built using Microsoft’s Stream video platform and will work with the newly announced Viva Engage module that Microsoft announced today at Inspire. Video Clip will be in public preview in August and generally available in September. Microsoft also showed off collaborative annotations for Teams which will allow all meeting participants to draw, type and react on top of/to content that’s shared in a meeting using the Microsoft Whiteboard toolset. Collaborative annotations are now generally available.
