You can now Skype in Office Online and OneDrive

Microsoft-owned Skype today announced new integrations of its messaging and calling capabilities inside more Microsoft services: specifically Office Online (that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote Online) and OneDrive.

“This creates a natural, collaborative experience where you can co-edit a document right alongside a chat so that the chat is in context of the topic being discussed,” the Skype team wrote in a blog post. “Best of all, this chat history stays connected to the document the next time you open it to help you pick right up where you left off.”

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This launch follows the redesigned Skype integration into Outlook.com last year.

Microsoft has been doing more to enhance its collaboration capabilities. Office is of course popular. So is Skype. Microsoft has Yammer, too. But the company is facing competition from many directions, including Docs and Hangouts from Google. But there’s also hot startup Slack, which has messaging at its core. It does allow users to create documents, but it’s also been enhancing voice and video capability. So Microsoft is embedding Skype in the places where its services can be more useful than Skype on its own, and fleshing out the core Skype app, too.

Last month, for example, Skype for iOS got native Office support.