infoTECH Feature

October 01, 2014

Microsoft Puts New Life in Office with Sway Presentation

Microsoft (News - Alert) has been making a lot of gains as of late, starting with recent news of a new preview of Windows 10 and carrying on through the rest of the line, as Microsoft puts more focus on an evolving, more unified experience in general. But Microsoft Office wasn't to be left out of the proceedings as reports suggest that, as of Oct. 1, Microsoft Office gets a shot of new life in content aggregation and presentation tool Sway.

Sway—which until very recently went under its code name of “Remix”—is set to be available as a Web app, which in turn can be reached by most of the major Web browser platforms. Naturally, Internet Explorer will get there, but so too will Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and reports suggest that most mobile operating systems—Android (News - Alert), iOS and Windows Phone particularly--will be able to get in on the action in the near-term, though exactly when that will hit is somewhat unclear at this stage.

But for those who can get in, which will be most everybody, Sway will offer up an interesting tool, a sort of presentation mechanism for finished ideas. Users will be able to choose from among several types of layout, and complete digital outputs—referred to as “sways”—that can be exhibited for later consumption through standard link and through posts on supported social media like Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert).  Some have already begun comparing Sway to OneNote, which is also an aggregation app, but Microsoft has noted that Sway is more of a means to show off finished ideas—the social media routing helps on that front—while OneNote is more the kind of place where users go to build finished ideas for later use. Indeed, Microsoft notes that entire websites could be built on Sway, and so too could book reports or marketing materials.

Sway is said to particularly illustrate a common point that Microsoft has been particularly focused on lately, the “mobile first, cloud first” concept. This would likely be more an expression of “cloud first” as the “mobile first” seems to be a bit lagging, but since it's set to follow in the fairly near-term future by some reports, this point can likely be overlooked. Sway also seems inordinately geared to the consumer and small business rather than the larger-scale enterprise user as yet; many critical supports like OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Office Graph support aren't yet in play. These likely will be soon, however, so enterprise users will be able to step up to this before too much longer.

Indeed, Microsoft pointed out that Sway would be available at what's being described as “a very early point in its lifecycle,” a point that lets Microsoft carry on nicely with the theme of evolving and changing that it drove home rather well at the Enterprise Technical Preview and the introduction of Windows 10. There have been quite a few changes for Microsoft of late, and it needs to be careful about this. While it's always encouraging to see that a company is eager to provide a great user experience and bring in said users' input to modify that experience, it's also worth noting that Microsoft needs to look at least somewhat decisive here as well.

Still, it's clear that Microsoft's ready to take risks and make mistakes, and is fully prepared to provide the user experience that the user wants, no matter what said experience may actually look like.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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