Alongside the new Facebook Mail, the social network has synchronized with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps so that Facebook users will be able to view Word, Excel and Powerpoint attachments without having to leave the site. The news has been backed by Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate VP of the Office Product Management group by saying that this new feature will be used in entertaining and business purposes also. Yet if we are to consider security reasons, it is very unlikely that businesses will share documents through the Facebook platform.

This is an important advancement made by Microsoft, since now it has stepped into the most popular social network of the Web. Microsoft already integrated Facebook into Bing last month and the Office Web apps were among the first service to use Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature.  This also marks another combined effort against Google, which has a web-based documents and management solution.

It’s another point of integration for Facebook mail, where users will have their email messages filtered according to the relationship they have with the sender. The closer the relationship between the sender and the recipient, the more priority the email has; it somewhat resembles the concepts behind Gmail’s Priority Inbox.

Apart from the merger with Facebook on Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft is working on increasing Live Messenger’s popularity on other platforms including the Xbox and mobile handsets, its primary focus when it comes to Facebook is search integration. Facebook users can search people on Bingm view those people’s friends and those friends’ likes.

The partnership between Bing and Facebook is aimed at creating a better experience ‘for customers, allowing them to bring their friends with them into the Bing experience, making search more social, more personal and more useful’, according to Bing Group Program Manager, Paul Yiu.