Office Mobile 2010 Beta for Windows phone – Whats new and exciting
Arguably one of the strongest features of the Windows Mobile (aka Windows phone, which I still can’t get used to) platform is it’s integration, support and feature matching of the Microsoft Office suite. This is a highly desired feature for most corporate enterprise customers and a good chunk of consumers. This still stands true today and it appears that Microsoft is taking steps to continue to build and improve on this with their Office Mobile 2010 plans.
This week on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile the beta version of the new Office Mobile 2010 was made available on devices running Windows Mobile 6.5. The same week that the full blown Office 2010 beta was made public as well in both x86 and x64 versions.
The previous Office Mobile 6.1 (also available on the Marketplace for WM 5.0 w/MSFP and above), was released back in 2007 together with the Windows Mobile 6.1 launch. It supplied support for the new Office 2007 file formats. The Office Mobile 6.1 home page is here, and FAQ.
This Office Mobile 2010 beta copy will expire on April 5th, 2010, and it is unknown how the final release will be licensed. We can only hope that Microsoft makes it available to the broadest audience possible.
So what is new?
A quick marketing run-down is available in “The Top 10 benefits of Office Mobile 2010” is posted here.
Also interesting to note in the video presentation of “What’s New in Microsoft Office Mobile 2010” by Dev Balasybramanian is the mention of “Mobile Document Viewers” that can be used on almost any mobile device, including iPhone and Blackberry. I believe this is in reference to the general SharePoint 2010 mobile support as detailed here.
Installation from Marketplace
Details on the beta:
Was painless and easy:
After the reboot, nice new icons are available:
I will quickly go through each application and give some highlights. Of course this could all change as this is a beta public release. But usually the Microsoft public releases are feature complete and just bug fixes remain.
Word Mobile 2010 beta
Functional appears to be exactly the same as the 6.1 version from what I could tell:
Excel Mobile 2010 beta
I was unable to quickly see any new menu features in the product. So if Microsoft is stating that is some new supported formulas I would have to take their word on it. :-)
PowerPoint Mobile 2010 beta
The options appear to be the same as in the previous release, but the landscape right and left-handed have disappeared..
One of the first changes I noticed is the missing menu triangle which used to appear on screen, and when pressed displayed the application menu. There is now a nice clean look, and the same finger swipe gestures can be used. An automatic timeout removes the top and bottom lines of the screen so the slide is full-screen. If you press and hold down on the screen, a smaller menu appears to assist in the slide deck movement.
The rest of the functions appear to be same, with the exception of the new “Presentation Companion” option. This requires a bluetooth pairing to a computer running the same PowerPoint slide deck and lets you control the presentation from the phone! Now, this is not something new for the Windows Mobile platform as back in 2008 the Windows SideShow for Windows Mobile was released and various information can be found on how that works.
If you select “Email steps” on the bottom left of the screen a nice feature lets you e-mail the on screen steps to yourself or others:
The 4-step instructions are as follows:
“Presentation Companion allows you to deliver a presentation on your computer from your Windows® phone. To use Presentation Companion, do the following:
1.If you haven't installed Presentation Companion on your computer, install it from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165847.
2. On your computer, open the presentation, and, on the ribbon, click the Add-Ins tab, and then click Presentation Companion.
3. On your phone, open the presentation, tap Menu, and then tap Presentation Companion.
4. Use the wizard on your phone to connect to your computer.”
The 6.2Mb installation of Presentation Companion 1.0 Beta is painless and requires no reboot (love it when that is the case). It does install some additional Office and .Net Framework components in my case, running Office 2007. This proves a point that you don’t need Office 2010 beta to use this feature.
Once the pre-requisites are installed the actual installation of the tool can begin:
After installation I pulled up the deck I wanted to control in my PowerPoint 2007 and got this prompt for the new add-in:
And did see the new addition in Add-Ins ribbon:
I clicked Start and was prompted to setup Bluetooth:
My Toshiba notebook wasn’t too happy with the Bluetooth stack when I answered yes, so I decided to pair up the phone, from the phone instead. Clicked Next and then Add Computer (still in PowerPoint Mobile 2010). After searching and typing in the PIN on both sides it paired up successfully! In the mean time I updated my Toshiba bluetooth stack from here, and it still failed to work. Then I found Steve “fyiguy” Hughes excellent idea to install and use the Microsoft IntelliPoint drivers and that finally worked like a charm:
Now with the same PowerPoint files open on both devices, I have a powerful companion for my presentations. The notes for each slide will be displayed on the Windows phone, and I can navigate and control the slides on the computer from my phone!
If you select “Clicker Slide Show” the slide notes are not shown, and instead the slide itself on the phone. Pretty slick. The only thing I felt was missing was a cursor or mouse arrow that I could highlight on the slides during a presentation.
Supposely the PowerPoint Mobile 2010 now has supported for rendering of SmartArt graphics. But in my test it appeared to fail to render it in the same way as on my computer. I hope fewer failures and missed graphics than I have seen on Office Mobile 6.1, where at times it has crashed and burned on me but more testing is of course needed.. So far it appears very stable, but I’m not sure which SmartArt graphics it supports..
OneNote Mobile
This client appears to to be the almost the same version as the one supplied in Office Mobile 6.1 back in 2007 (which had Build 12.0.4518.1055). It also doesn’t bear the “beta” word it’s in title, so I’m guessing it is fairly untouched compared to the others in the suite.
SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 beta
I don’t have a SharePoint 2010 Beta setup running, so I couldn’t fully test the SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 beta client. Perhaps others could comment on this and their findings?
Looks like it has some nice features to sync information back and forth from SharePoint. Together with the possibility to edit documents from SharePoint and save them back this indeed could appeal to many enterprise customers with employees on the go..
Outlook Mobile 2010
Although not in the Office Mobile 2010 beta installation. A new client is available together with the Exchange 2010 launch. It is already included on the Window Mobile 6.5 devices, and available for Windows Mobile 6.1 devices here.
Please see my previous posting on Exchange 2010 and mobility here for more details.
What’s Exciting
As a recap, the PowerPoint Mobile Presenter Companion is definitely something new for the Office Mobile suite. And the SharePoint Mobile client gives additional benefits to view, and modify your SharePoint document libraries when on the go. Outlook Mobile is near and dear to the heart of most Windows Mobile users and not surprising more tied to the Exchange server release cycle than Office Mobile.
Old staples such as Excel Mobile and Word Mobile appear to be felt alone and perhaps a good thing at this time. So I wouldn’t call this a major release of the Office Mobile suite, but maybe a update to keep it refreshed in the new Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace world it now has.
Time will tell if and how a perhaps greater refresh of the Office Mobile suite will occur around the timeline of Windows Mobile 7.0..
Future Support
On my wish-list I would like to see:
LiveMeeting - Cisco WebEx is has already been available for the iPhone since January.. Why couldn’t a LiveMeeting Mobile client be created? I’m guessing that next Office Communication Server 2010 will bring more LiveMeeting features.. We can only hope that mobility is more a part of that as they have done successfully in the Office Communicator Mobile client.
Visio – Why not port the Visio 2010 Viewer over to Windows Mobile?
Project – With Project 2010 Server being installed on-top of SharePoint I wonder if any mobility features are being thought of there..
Nokia - With the Nokia partnership announced back in August, and the pending release of Office Mobile 2010 after the beta cycle, will this mean that the Nokia/Symbian release is next up?
|\\arco..