Social Office

A lot of people who use facebook also use Office so Microsoft Fuse labs have used Azure to provide Office document sharing between facebook users in much the same way as facebook users can now share pictures and videos.

I Simply went to https://docs.com and signed in with my facebook account to get started.

I then went back to facebook and clicked on the + on the tabs and select docs to get a docs tab..

and now I can create  a document in facebook, in this case PowerPoint..

Notice I am now using Office 2010 web apps, although I could elect to open full fat office and edit the deck that way if I wanted to. Notice I also have all the usual facebook social tools to the right including privacy.  I can also upload one I made earlier such as my SQL Server consolidation deck featuring some of my cartoons ..

I find this interesting for 3 reasons:

• It’s useful e.g.  for homework, for organising community work to simply as another means of getting a message out to customers. 
• It breaks the link between the data and the application and changes the focus on to what a user wants to do.  This shift is also apparent in office itself for example when I want to prepare a deck for an event I just work in PowerPoint as it has pretty good tools for embedding video and enhancing images without me needing to switch to using a separate tool for each of these.
• It shows what can be done by 4 developers in a couple of months using Azure as the platform
• It shows how Office Web Apps has come on since 2003 

You can try all this yourself now  which might be a welcome change from virtual  farming on facebook!