Microsoft Corp. chief executive Satya Nadella’s ongoing effort to open up his company’s products to the broader technology ecosystem is starting to pay dividends for users. Office Online this week received new integrations that make it possible to collaborate in real-time on documents kept inside Box, Dropbox and several other third party alternatives to Redmond’s own OneDrive.

Providers whose services are not supported on launch will be able to add connectors for their customers through the Cloud Storage Partner Program that Microsoft inaugurated early last year, according to Office team lead Kirk Koenigsbauer. File sharing options are listed in a new “Places” menu that enables users to navigate to files on an external platform almost as if it were just another OneDrive folder. The idea is to remove the collaboration barriers that often exist within organizations, particularly the large global kind.

A subsidiary created through an acquisition, for instance, may use a different file sharing provider than the rest of the workforce. The chance of such a conflict grows even bigger when it comes to the channel partners with which an organization collaborates on marketing efforts, not to mention suppliers and countless other companies in its extended business ecosystem. The new co-editing feature enables customers in such situations to work on documents with the same efficiency as they would under more convenient circumstances.

Changes made to a Word, Excel or PowerPoint files are displayed for every person in the editing window as soon as they appear, along with a color-coded annotations meant to help distinguish who’s doing what. The functionality is only available for the web-based version of Office, but users of the iOS and Android clients do stand to benefit from the increased choice of third party storage services. Customers are also gaining the ability to attach documents from Dropbox, Box and OneDrive to their emails directly through the Outlook interface, which provides a choice between embedding a file below the body of a message or simply adding a link.

Image via Peggy Marco