{"id":5347,"date":"2014-10-02T15:49:16","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T14:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5347"},"modified":"2014-10-02T15:53:48","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T14:53:48","slug":"office-sway-breezes-into-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2014\/10\/office-sway-breezes-into-view.htm","title":{"rendered":"Office “Sway” breezes into view"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a new Office authoring product<\/a>. \u00a0It’s not about blogs, documents, or presentations – its all of those and neither of them (say Microsoft). It’s something totally new: a “web-oriented canvas with content aggregation and assisted authoring”. And it’s called Sway<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m sure there are other products that do similar things – my kids are very excited about the things they’re doing at school\u00a0using\u00a0Google Drive at the moment (although I’m not sure that goes quite as far). \u00a0Storify\u00a0has been around for a while, but Sway seems to go further – and I think it’s\u00a0really quite exciting…<\/p>\n

Sway is about sharing information – the content people have access to (photos, social posts) but this is increasingly dynamic – so we want to create presentations that reflect the current state of things. As users, we create\/publish\/share instantly but need to do this without having to master the details of many apps. Microsoft sees Sway as a digital assistant to do the “heavy lifting” for polished cohesive output.<\/p>\n

I’m sure that all sounds good to a marketing person\u00a0but what does it\u00a0really mean<\/em>? Well, I have a real use case. I have something that I’d like to present to a particular audience (Milton Keynes Geek Night<\/a>).\u00a0That audience is made up (mostly) of designers, web developers and very image-conscious people. They know what looks good. \u00a0I have 1 minute to get my message across – and if it looks messy… well, I’ve blown it.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0want to avoid\u00a0using the same templates that people have seen time and time again, or needing great design skills – and Sway uses machine-based algorithms to help present the content. It’s kind of like a “designer in a box” where I can specify intent (what’s important, what to keep together, etc.) and use Sway’s capability to display on different devices – with it’s\u00a0engine to reflowing content\u00a0appropriately to the device.<\/p>\n

There’s a Microsoft video that demonstrates this and draws out the fact that Sway is mobile-first, cloud-first so device agnostic (indeed, Microsoft starts the demo using\u00a0an iPhone):<\/p>\n