Bringing PowerPoint to the Web

Late last year, the world found out for sure that Microsoft was investing in bringing Office apps to the web (though smart observers have been guessing that we are for a lot longer than that). Last week, we provided some more insight into how these Web apps would work, with videos and other information on the Office 2010 site. Later on, we’ll have a Technical Preview for the Web apps, so many of you will be able to try them out for yourselves.

In the meantime, I thought I’d kick things off by talking about how we think about the Office Web Apps (and the PowerPoint Web App, in particular) as a way of beginning the conversation.

Shared vision

One of the important decisions made early on in the development of the Web Apps was that the core engineering teams (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) would be directly involved in the development of the Web Apps (as opposed to, for example, creating an entirely separate team with a mandate to build a web-based suite). This decision was important because it ensured continuity between the desktop apps and the new web apps, both from a technology and engineering perspective but also from a vision and planning perspective.

This means that when we, the PowerPoint team, think about the future of presentations and presenting, we consider the full spectrum of the experience including the desktop, mobile devices and the web.  We think of PowerPoint not just as the desktop app we’ve known for 20-odd years, but as a set of presentation experiences that span the devices and screens that you’re using.

As an example of how this played out, one of the innovations we developed in the 2010 release for both the web app and the desktop app is the notion of the reading view for presentations. It’s well known that many people find it useful to use PowerPoint documents as a direct form of communication without an accompanying human presentation.

On the web - a medium that encourages sharing - we designed the reading view to be the default view, so, with a one click, you can be reading a presentation shared with you, displayed almost[*] exactly as it would be in the PowerPoint desktop app itself, with the fonts, layout, effects and animations as the author intended. In the desktop app, we also invested in a reading view (more detail on that in another post) which parallels the one in the web app, but we made the decision that, for the desktop app, the standard rich authoring environment should remain the default view for documents.

In both cases, we made it easy to switch views – on the web, a click on the Edit button gets you into our web editing environment (you can also go straight to editing view, if you want). In the PowerPoint 2010 desktop app, the reading view is an option in the view switcher on the status bar.

Shared tenets

The core engineering teams building Web Apps also agreed on a set of tenets that would guide our overall planning and development. Last Friday, Mike Morton, GPM for the Office Web App shared team (among other things, they build infrastructure used by all of the Web Apps, including PowerPoint), shared these three tenets on the new Office Web Apps blog. I’ll summarize them briefly (but I encourage you to read the full post):

• Users should trust that their document content will be safe during editing.
• Users should expect the familiarity of the Office user experience.
• Users should expect their documents to be displayed with high fidelity.

Another way to look at those tenets is they describe the difference between what it means to build a presentation app on the web, and what it means to build PowerPoint on the web. A web app with the name “PowerPoint” brings with it certain expectations and responsibilities –expectations around user experience and visual fidelity and the responsibility to ensure that presentation content is kept intact as it moves between web and desktop and from user to user.

It’s worth noting that these tenets describe expectations and responsibilities that are not fundamentally different those we hold to during development of new versions of the desktop applications.

This is deliberate.

We do not think of the Office Web Apps as second-class citizens. We think of them as part of the set of products we call PowerPoint (or Word, or Excel or OneNote). Nor do we think of web users as somehow different people from the desktop app users. Each app with the PowerPoint name, whether desktop or web (or mobile), is designed to meet the needs of PowerPoint users in different environments and with different requirements.

PowerPoint Web App Scenarios

Now, naturally, these are the very first releases of the Office Web Apps. In one release, we needed to build new services on two separate platforms (Windows Live for consumers and SharePoint for enterprise customers) that met the high standards we had set for ourselves. In order to be able complete this work on time, we focused, for our initial release, on a core set of scenarios that customers told us were the most important. In (more or less) priority order, the scenarios we focused on for the PowerPoint Web App are:

• Reading a presentation anywhere – either your own or one that was shared with you – with high-fidelity.
• Giving a standard presentation anywhere and to anyone.
• Sharing your presentation with others.
• Making key edits to the presentation anywhere.

Over the next weeks, we’ll have posts here on the PowerPoint blog covering these scenarios in some detail, and the Office Web App blog will have posts discussing the Web Apps in general. The other four Web Apps will also be discussed on the Word, Excel blogs and OneNote blogs. If there is any other topic you’d like us to talk about, please let us know in the comments. And, once you get your hands on the Web Apps, let us know via the connect site, or in the comments below, what you think of the product, how well we’ve met our goals and what you think we should be doing better.

Thanks for reading. We’re excited to finally be able to talk about the work we’ve been doing for over 2 years, and we’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

Sean Lyndersay
Lead Program Manager, PowerPoint Web App

[*] Yes, almost exactly.  We’re very happy with what we’ve accomplished with the PowerPoint Web app and its support for a majority of PowerPoint features, but there are a few things we won’t be supporting on the web. Rather than get into it in this already long post, we’ll follow up with a detailed post on the web reading view, which will cover the important features.