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Office Web Applications

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Office Web Applications is a new web based productivity offering in Microsoft Office 2010 suite. You can watch the demo here: Demo of the Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps services include companions to Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, and Microsoft OneNote 2010. These would be available on Windows Live at no cost to users as an ad-supported service (read: Office Web Apps Coming to Windows Live). For enterprise users, it can be hosted on SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint Foundation 2010 or the SharePoint Server 2010) either on-premise or online.

Office Web Applications are licensed with Office 2010 and need to be installed and enabled on top of SharePoint 2010. These applications are focused on offering access to Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Excel 2010, and OneNote 2010 documents through any browser across multiple platforms, lightweight creation and editing capabilities in standard formats. When enabled, it enhances experience of SharePoint user. For example,

  • When user clicks on an Office document in a Document Library it will launch the Office Web App viewer
  • When user clicks ‘New Document’ in a Document Library to create a new Office document but does not have the respective desktop application, Office Web Application will be launched to author the document

Browsers Supported

  • Internet Explorer 7 and 8
  • Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Safari 4 on Mac

Read The Office Web Apps Love Your Browser for more details.

Silverlight integration

Office Web Applications works whether or not Silverlight is installed on the machine. With Silverlight, the user experience gets better. For example:

  • Faster load performance
  • Improved text fidelity, better text spacing, better rendering and zoom beyond 100%
  • Text will respect ClearType tuner settings
  • Improved accuracy of hit highlighting in Find
  • Smoother PowerPoint animations and improved slide scaling

Read Under the Hood: Find in the Word Web App Viewer and The Office Web Apps Love Your Browser posts for more details.

Deploying Office Web Applications

Refer the Deploy Office Web Apps document available on the Microsoft Download Center. Deploying Office Web Apps involves three primary phases:

  1. Installing Office Web Apps by running setup (WCSetup.exe).
  2. Activating the Office Web Apps services.
  3. Activating the Office Web Apps feature on those site collections for which the Office Web Apps should be available.

PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show feature

The functionality provided by the PowerPoint Web Application, also enables the PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show feature. This is a new feature in Microsoft Office 2010 that enables presenters to broadcast a slide show from PowerPoint 2010 to remote viewers who watch in a Web browser. Broadcast Slide Show gives organizations options to provide broadcast slideshow services to users either as an internally-hosted service or as a service accessed over the Internet.

Broadcast Slide Show and Microsoft Live Meeting are complementary technologies, each providing a different level of functionality and end-user experience.

Capability

Broadcast Slide Show

Microsoft Live Meeting

Client Software

Included in Office PowerPoint 2010

LiveMeeting client

Hosting

Available with or without internally hosted server

Internally hosted or through an externally hosted service

Broadcast

PowerPoint slide show only

Any desktop application

Purpose

Just-in-time shared slideshows

Broad communication and collaboration capabilities

Use when…

You want a low-infrastructure solution for impromptu slideshow broadcasts

You want a complete Web conferencing solution with collaboration tools

To learn more about deploying Broadcast Slide Show, refer to the Deploying Broadcast Slide Show document.