Elium is an Office 365 Cloud Storage Partner. This partnership allows us to have a seamless integration between Elium and Office Online and therefore a smooth editing of Office files.

In order to edit a document from Elium and Office Online, the contributor must have a Microsoft 365 Business license.

In order to activate the feature, you have to toggle the integration in the admin panel integration page.

Any Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) can be modified in one click.

To do this, open a Story that contains a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file on your Elium platform and click on it.

This action will open a document preview popup.

You just have to click on the button labeled "Edit in Office Online" at the bottom right of this popup. This will open the edited document directly in the dedicated Microsoft 365 application. In this example, Word Online.

You can now make all your changes. They are automatically saved in the file hosted on Elium.

Note: Several people can edit the document at the same time in Office Online.

In the top left corner, you have access to the saving information. You can see in which Story the file is saved, under which platform and when the last automatic save was made.

Once the changes are complete, you can either go back or click on the link to the Story from the popup above ("Edit a Word docum..." in the example).

When you edit a file from within Office Online, Elium creates a draft with your file changes. Since Office Online saves your changes in real time, this allows you to publish your changes to Elium when you are finished.

Elium informs 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 then publish the changes.

And that's it! You have modified your file without leaving your web browser.

When you edit a file with the Office integration, your requests hit the same infrastructure used for Office for the web and related services in Microsoft 365. Which means you benefit from the same strong security and privacy protections.

Two classes of customer data flow through Office for the web servers: user metadata and customer content (documents, presentations, workbooks, and notebooks).

User metadata consists of URLs, email addresses, user IDs, and so on. This data lives in memory and travels back and forth between Office for the web and Elium through HTTPS. Office for the web goes to great lengths to scrub all personally identifying information (PII) from its logs. This is regularly audited to ensure Office for the web is compliant with several different privacy standards.

In the case of customer content, Office for the web retrieves it from Elium in order to render it for viewing or editing.

With the exception of caching (discussed below), it's reasonable to say that customer content only lives on Office for the web servers during a user session. That is, a user can reasonably expect that when they end an editing session, their content no longer lives anywhere on Office for the web servers once it's been saved to the host. The key exception here is the Office for the web viewing cache.

In order to optimize 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 more than one person wants to view a document, Office for the web only has to fetch it and render it once. It's important to note that a complete removal of the cache would significantly degrade the customer experience for many users and dramatically increase the cost of running Office for the web.

Documents live in the cache until they become unpopular. That is, the cache isn't time-based but rather based on available space and usage. Unpopular files might expire out of the cache in only a few days while popular documents might remain in the cache for up to 30 days.

More information on the Microsoft documentation.