Sway: The Newest App In the Office Portfolio

This week Microsoft introduced a new app in the Office portfolio. It’s called Sway, and it’s being marketed as a totally new, super quick way to visually bring all your ideas to life. The concept with Office Sway is that when ideas start to flow, Sway is there to help you explore, visualize and share them quickly. You can create beautiful web-based expressions of your ideas and get them out to an audience instantly, so other people can view them from their computers, phones or browsers. Sway has no borders, page breaks, edges slides or cells. Your ideas are presented on an open canvas without restrictions or the hassle of having to design or think about formatting.

I think having the ability to research information to visually build out your ideas quickly from a single app on your cell phone and then immediately share your ideas without worrying about how people using different devices and browsers will view it, it’s very powerful.

Sway was built from the ground up for web and devices alike and adapts to fit the device it is being viewed on. A “Sway” is what Microsoft calls the canvas that you create on while using Sway. Sway is native to the cloud, so it is really easy to drop your content from your cloud storage, your devices and even your social networks. It’s easy to collect all your content from different sources, within Sway. Sway shows you all of the content that you have stored in the cloud and accessing it is as easy as tapping or clicking, and dragging/dropping it right into your canvas. Some built-in sources include OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more sources are coming soon.

Design in mind
Sway has a built-in design engine that takes the hassle out of formatting your content for multiple devices. The design engine puts your content into a cohesive layout as you create it. It also allows you to adjust and customize the format in intuitive ways. You don’t need to worry about the exact pixel height and width of your images. You can just tap or click your images and tap or click icons to emphasize them. These are just a few of the intuitive, time saving, and creativity enabling features in Sway.

As a designer, I am excited for the freedom and ease to express my ideas that Sway will give me, whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.

Sway Preview
Sway is new and still in preview, improving upon the application. If you are interested in trying Sway, you can request an invite at Sway.com. Microsoft wants Office users to try out Sway and give them your honest feedback. What you like, what you don’t like and what can be improved on or added to Sway. Anyone using Sway currently can share their Sways to anyone.

The future looks bright for Microsoft and Sway, with new features and expansions already in the works!

How will your organization use Sway?

• Within SharePoint for blog content?
• To create your organizations Wikipedia?
• With your social networks to present customer feedback?

These are just a few examples of ways you can use Sway for your organization.