Microsoft's Mac team is reportedly poring over the newly released development kit for the iPhone. Can a iPhone-ready version of Office be far behind?

Fortune is reporting that a team of Microsoft engineers has been picking over the iPhone SDK for about a week now, and while the group behind Office for Mac isn't making any promises, it sounds like a version of Office tailored to the iPhone is a definite maybe.

"It's important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone," Microsoft exec Tom Gibbons said in the Fortune story. "To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we're actually in the process of trying to understand that now."

Meanwhile, software developer DataViz, which makes a series of excellent Office document editors for Windows Mobile, Palm, and (soon) BlackBerry devices is said to be digging into the iPhone SDK as well.

So one way or another, it looks like we'll be seeing some serious Office-ready applications for the iPhone come June, when the iTunes App store is slated for launch.

Indeed, one of the questions I get most frequently from corporate road warriors considering the iPhone is whether they'll be able to edit Office documents on it. (Answer: You can read Word and Excel files, but you can't edit them.)

Of course, while I always appreciated the ability to edit Office docs on my old Treo, I can't say I ever actually did it that much, beyond the odd tweak.

Anyway, who out there is eager to compose and edit Office files on your iPhone? Anyone on the fence who'd snap up an iPhone if Office was in the picture?

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Microsoft looks to cash in on the iPhone [Fortune]