Good Technology Lets Mobile Users Edit Microsoft Office Documents

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Conventional wisdom holds that the line between choosing a PC or tablet often comes down to content creation and consumption. Most people don’t want to create documents and spreadsheets using a tablet device. But it’s become clear that users do prefer to consume content on a tablet. Unfortunately, between content creation and consumption there’s a gray area surrounding the editing of an existing document. Turns out most people who consume content on a tablet would also like to be able to edit that content on the same tablet.

To address this issue, Good Technology this week announced that users of its Good Work secure mobile email application can now both view and edit Microsoft Office attachments. Lynn Lucas, chief marketing officer for Good Technology, says that by tapping into Microsoft Office Web Apps, users of the Good Technology mobile platform no longer have to wait until they can fire up a PC to add a comment to a particular document or change a set of numbers.

Lucas notes that the latest survey of its user base not only showed a spike in the number of mobile applications being activated, but half of the users indicated they wanted to be able to edit documents using a tablet or smartphone.

Good Technology, says Lucas, plans to further investigate what other types of documents mobile users want to be able to edit. Users of the Good Technology platform, says Lucas, can already access files residing in Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce applications. But Lucas says the message is clear: Users of mobile computing devices want to be able to do a lot more than just read their email.

How the ability to edit documents from a mobile computing device will affect whether more users lean away from PCs remains to be seen. But when you consider the amount of time most people spend creating complex content versus just trying to interact with it on a simple level, the shift to mobile computing devices may become much more pronounced than people ever thought.