Nearly a year ago, Microsoft announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program for Office, enabling third-party storage providers like Box, Citrix ShareFile, and Salesforce to connect their services to Office Online for document viewing and editing. This followed a previously announced partnership with Dropbox.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s making Office easier for customers to use with such cloud storage providers by adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services. They’re extending Office for iOS integration to al partners in the program, enabling integration between Outlook.com and storage services.

“Since 2013, we’ve offered real-time co-authoring with Office Online documents stored in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online,” says Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer. “Today, we are extending this capability to cloud storage providers in the CSPP program. Real-time co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users whose documents are stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Also starting today, any other partner in the CSPP program can enable real-time co-authoring using standard interfaces.”

“Starting today, in addition to Dropbox, we’re offering all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS,” he adds. “This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as “places” in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their favorite cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with confidence that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. We’ll follow with other mobile platforms later this year.”

Microsoft also announced that Dropbox and Box Outlook integrations, which it has offered in mobile apps in the past, are now coming to users of the new Outlook.com so they can attach files from these services right from their inboxes.

Images via Microsoft