This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Talks 2009 Las Vegas, speaker: Mike Morton, MS.

The core design tenets of Office Web Apps is really around the traditional Office experience, the high fidelity (layout appears just as intended) and trust (roundtrip from PC to Phone to Web).

Demo
The presenter shows a Word document opened in the browser from a SharePoint site. The nice thing is that it really looks like PDF although it is Word. It is even pixel perfect in the sense that you can zoom it and it still looks perfect. High fidelity indeed. That includes for instance the Ribbon for editing the document in the browser, the spelling checker including the right click contextual menus. Key take away here is that editing in the browser mimics the Office experience. Type for instance 1. and it will recognize that you want to make a list. Auto correction, CTRL-Z, selecting a column of a table, resize cells etc it is all there right inside your browser.

Let’s have a look at PowerPoint. It is by the PowerPoint engine rendering engine on the server so your PPT inside the browser looks exactly the same as within your Office attention. And again it is incredible to see the way it works in the browser. Animations work, making new slides, select the right layout, even the Smart art works right there in the browser! So if you have a deck and want to make a last minute exchange, just log on to the browser, go to your SharePoint site, open the document and there you go. No hassle with PPT version differences.

Go on to One Note in the browser. Just like in the fixed Office app you will have the ability to make multiple notebooks, make pages, upload pictures and so on. Large images are managed easily. So growing, shrinking of the images, it is all taken care of on the server. The image always looks sharp. In addition to that SharePoint adds page versioning to One Note. Tagging, like you do when you make To do’s out of your list, is supported as well. When you try to load the Notebook into your fixed Office App, new sections and page are marked black, like unread items to make you aware of the online changes that were applied. The autosave makes sure that your OneNote book is synced with the SharePoint site involuntarily.

The last office Web App is Excel. The presenter shows an Excel page opened in the browser. Making formulas by selecting areas of cells works in the browser. Also conditional formatting, charts, KPI cell indicators are supported. Filtering is there and works on the list but also on the charts. Key take away is that it really feels the same as all of the Office apps on your desktop!

Myth: Office web apps are only useful for customers without Office on their desktop?
Office customers benefit from Office across devices: laptop, phone, browser. Take for instance Outlook web access and Outlook Mobile. So that will be the same for the other Office apps.
There are better together features with desktop apps and servers:

• co-authoring,
• powerpoint broadcast slide show,
• save directly to SharePoint from Office Desktop Apps,
• work with others with different versions of Office or no Office at all,
• in place viewing and editing of Office ID while remaining in the browser.

Large files
Presenter shows that a 6MB ID opens basically split second. That means that the server only loads the first pages, not the entire document at once. Reading the document in the browser even becomes quicker than offline!

Broadcast Slide show
You can basically take any deck, start broadcast and it will make a link for you which you send through email, type the list of receivers and start the slideshow. The receivers start their browser window and the presentation will play. Really, the one who started the broadcast is in full control, like if you started a live meeting without all of the hassle.

Myth: Office web apps only run on Internet Explorer???
Presenter shows running examples on Linux Fedora, Mobile, Firefox and even the Nintendo Wii (not sure if that makes sense). For Mobile there is a different version that really renders crispy powerpoints. So what about Silverlight. You do not require it at all. But what if you have it? You will get quicker load performance, improved text fidelity and zoom further than 100%, the text will respect the ClearType settings and you will have smoother PowerPoint presentations.

Myth: Office web apps will replace the desktop apps???
Desktop apps wait the richest suite in the world. Office gives customers choice across a broad range of platforms. Something about the history of Word: started as Word for Dos, 1985 next Word for the Mac, next Word for the Atari St in 1988, 1989 Word for Windows. 1992 Word for OS2, 2000 Office Mobile, 20xx Office Mobile for Nokia, Office 2010 and Office 2010 Web Apps.

SharePoint integration with Office Web Apps
Defaulting click in SharePoint opens Office Web App viewer. New ID: when you don’t have the Office desktop app, it will open the Office web app. Search: quickly view search consequences with the Office web apps, SharePoint as host for spreading slide shows.

Programmability
Word Conversion services: like how to make a PDF from a Word document or .doc to .docx and so forth. All possible through these services.
Excel web API: interact with cell data through this API.

File formats
The Office web apps really support natively Open XML formats like .docx, .pptx, .xslm, .docm and so on. It will exchange the older formats like .doc, .ppt and so on. Nearly all ID are compatible with the exception of the following: IRM protected ID, spreadsheets that depend on DDE and view-only ID with track changes.

System requirements
Office web apps are licensed with Office 2010. Office Web apps are a separate install on top of SharePoint. Browsers: safari, firefox, IE running on Mac, Linux and Windows.

Sign up on Office web apps:
http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.ID?aobrp=browse

email: mikmort@microsoft.com

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