Microsoft today announced Office for iPad and free Office Mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones.
The enterprise IT vendor also announced the Enterprise Mobility Suite, its cloud service to assist businesses to manage corporate data and services on the devices.
IT industry analysts say that Microsoft EMS will join a competitive mobile device/app management market that features VMware’s AirWatch unit, Citrix’s Zenprise unit, and BlackBerry’s BES 10, as well as offerings from private Good Technology and MobileIron.
In addition, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium and enhancements to Windows Intune.
Microsoft Office for iPad is available in 29 languages.
Office 365 subscribers can add an iPad as one of their chosen devices included in their subscription benefits, and can create and edit documents with Word for iPad, PowerPoint for iPad and Excel for iPad. These apps are available as free downloads from the App Store, enabling people to read and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Office for iPad brings full file fidelity across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone, and along with cloud storage from OneDrive or OneDrive for Business your files are up to date, wherever you need them on whatever device you want to use.
Microsoft also offers other iPad-optimized productivity applications, including OneNote, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Bing, Lync, Outlook Web Access, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Yammer and Skype.
Microsoft said the new Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) provides device, identity and access management with data protection from the cloud. EMS includes Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services to protect corporate assets and enable people to work on their devices.
The new Azure Active Directory Premium delivers cloud-based identity and access management with single sign-on to over 1,000 popular software as a service (SaaS) applications, self-service tools for users, and machine-learning-driven security reporting and anomaly detection. With Azure Active Directory Premium customers can reduce their IT costs and manage their users, groups and SaaS application access.
Microsoft also announced additional enhancements to Windows Intune, including support for the Samsung KNOX platform, Remote to My PC capability for Android and iOS devices, and support for the next update to Windows Phone, commitment to cloud-first mobile device management across all devices.
