I have a Windows 8.1 Professional computer but I have not installed any Office application such as Word, Excel etc. By using the Azure RemoteApp I can access these Windows programs on the Azure servers and do everything I want to do with them.
Read my previous post about creating a Azure RemoteApp Service here:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/07/creating-azure-remoteapp-service-now-in.html
The Program works in a Client / Server mode (ah!). You have a client sitting on your computer and it sends requests to your Azure RemoteApp Service in the Cloud. After establishing a connection you can work with any of the published programs on the Azure Cloud. In the Preview there are 6 or 7 programs that you will see in the rest of the post.
I test drove to see how it works and here are some screen shots and notes. It worked as it should but when I saved the files I edited/created to either OneDrive or my computer they did not get saved.
Oops!
I am sure they are on the server, because I could connect to server and open them. It is just they are not saved. There should be some explanation somewhere(!).
Here is how I went about editing a document on my OneDrive using the Word 2013 on my Azure RemoteApp Service.
Click on Microsoft RemoteApp client in your Metro page. The invitations page is displayed.
The client user interface opens as shown and the Microsoft RemoteApp
login page opens.
Enter the login information (Windows Live account)
Now all the applications get displayed in the user interface of client.
Let us open a word document. Click on Word icon in the client.
The client connects to the Azure RemoteApp as shown.
A little later you will see the Word Application opening and displaying as shown.You get a
Sign in page as shown, a modal window on top of a
Word document.
I did not sign in and took the other option.
Then you get the OneDrive page as shown.
Click Next.
Then you get a 'Good to Go' page.
Click on
All done!.
The Word document opens as shown with a number of templates.
Let us try out to open an existing document.
Click on
Open Other Documents on the left.
The Word document window changes to the following;
Click on OneDrive. The OneDrive wizard page is displayed as shown.
Sign in to OneDrive by providing username and password (Windows Live
account)[You get two separate pages for username and password]. This is an annoying feature requiring you to sign in multiple times, although the computer is working with Administrator login which happens to be Windows Live account the same used for creating the Azure RemoteApp Service as well as access to OneDrive.
Once you are authenticated you get a display of stuff on OneDrive as
shown.
Clicking on the
'The Author and the Book.docx', the document gets displayed.
Click on
File, the '
Info' page opens where you have several navigation
items(links) that you find in most Word documents.
Now if you open your
Azure RemoteApp (herein
hodenremote, review the first link in this post), the
hodenremote service page opens displaying the current session.
When I sign out of the client, the
Dashboard still displays one session but the Sessions tab shows that the
Session State is disconnected.
In '
hodenremote' you can access the
Dashboard as shown.
In the 'hodenremote' you can create/modify user access (Users/Groups).
The
RemoteApp Apps published to hodenremote are listed out here
The
Sessions page is shown here.
For an in depth understanding read this blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2014/05/12/windows-apps-in-the-cloud-introducing-microsoft-azure-remoteapp.aspx
The portal allows you to disconnect named users/ all users from the Dashboard as shown.
I edited a document and created a new one. After editing/creating I saved it to my OneDrive which the Azure RemoteApp Service displays as being saved but I did not find them on my OneDrive or on my computer when it was saved to computer.
Have fun!
