🔒 Permissions
Only contributors can edit files from Office Online. They must have a Microsoft 365 Business license. Readers don't need a license to read Office files.
Elium is an Office 365 Cloud Storage Partner. This partnership enables seamless integration between Elium and Office Online, facilitating smooth editing of Office files.
Requirements
To edit a document from Elium using Office Online, the contributor must possess a Microsoft 365 Business license.
Activation
To activate the feature, you need to toggle the integration on the admin panel integration page.
Editing an Office document from Elium
You can modify any Office document (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) with just one click.
To do this, open an article containing a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file on your Elium platform and click on it.
This action will bring up a document preview popup.
Simply click the button labeled "Edit in Office Online" located at the bottom right of this popup. This will open the document directly in the relevant Microsoft 365 application, such as Word Online in this example.
You can now make all your changes, which are automatically saved in the file hosted on Elium.
Note: Multiple users can edit the document simultaneously in Office Online.
In the top left corner, you can view the saving information, including which article the file is saved in, the platform, and the time of the last automatic save.
Once you finish making changes, you can either return or click on the link to the article from the popup above ("Edit a Word docum..." in this example).
When you edit a file in Office Online, Elium creates a draft reflecting your changes. Since Office Online saves your modifications in real time, you can publish your changes to Elium once you are finished.
Elium will notify you that your draft is ready via a banner, as shown below. Click on it to load the latest version.
When you are satisfied with your changes, you can publish them.
And that's it! You have successfully modified your file without leaving your web browser.
Data Processing
When you edit a file using the Office integration, your requests utilize the same infrastructure employed for Office for the web and related services in Microsoft 365. This means you benefit from the same robust security and privacy protections.
Two categories of customer data flow through Office for the web servers: user metadata and customer content (documents, presentations, workbooks, and notebooks).
User Metadata
User metadata includes URLs, email addresses, user IDs, and similar data. This information resides in memory and travels back and forth between Office for the web and Elium via HTTPS. Office for the web takes significant measures to scrub all personally identifying information (PII) from its logs. This process is regularly audited to ensure compliance with various privacy standards.
Customer Content
For customer content, Office for the web retrieves it from Elium to render it for viewing or editing.
Except for caching (discussed below), customer content typically only resides on Office for the web servers during a user session. This means that once a user ends an editing session, their content is no longer stored on Office for the web servers after being saved to the host. The key exception is the Office for the web viewing cache.
Caching
To enhance view performance for PowerPoint for the web and Word for the web, Office for the web stores rendered documents in a local disk cache. This way, if multiple users wish to view a document, Office for the web only needs to fetch and render it once. It's important to note that completely removing the cache would significantly degrade the customer experience for many users and dramatically increase the operational costs of running Office for the web.
Documents remain in the cache until they become unpopular. The cache is not time-based but instead depends on available space and usage. Unpopular files may expire from the cache within a few days, while popular documents can remain cached for up to 30 days.
For more information, refer to the Microsoft documentation.