Office Web Apps Go to School

Last Friday three members of the Office Web Apps team paid a visit to a class at the University of Washington here in Seattle. My role was to give a PowerPoint presentation and demo. All I took with me was a netbook. It didn’t have Office installed on it.

The purpose of our visit was to launch a field trial where about 30 students will be using the web apps for several weeks and then telling us what they think. The opportunity to engage face-to-face with these students is enormously valuable both as a gauge of where we are and as a source of feedback for where we should be going. I’ll post periodically about how the trial is progressing but today I want to talk about the presentation.

As I said, I showed up at UW with only a netbook without Office installed. That means no PowerPoint. I hooked the netbook up to the projector and launched IE8. I navigated to the SharePoint server that we are using for the trial and launched my presentation. I could have used Windows Live but I wanted to use the same environment that the students will be using. In only a few seconds the first slide was up on the wall in full-screen mode in PowerPoint Web App.

To really put PowerPoint Web App through its paces I made sure my presentation had lots of animations. I don’t think anybody noticed I was using PowerPoint Web App until I told them.

Nick Simons
Program Manager, Office Web Apps

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  • bla..bla..bla...i'm realy-realy-realy-realy tired of seen all those technologies from microsoft tested in Universities first! give me the web office and i will put it in my classroom, here, in a small island in aegean sea... or you need a catering in the university yard to give the permision first?

  • iam thinking to make abeg web sit by powerpoint2010 how i can start .?

  • This could be a great way for public schools to save on licensing costs in this era of diminishing funding.  I'd love to learn more about security features for kids/students in public schools, perhaps tying this in with inexpensive email hosting through Microsoft, etc.!  I'd love to learn more!

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