As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know I took part in a SkyDrive event in London last Friday and I thought I’d share with you some of the details of the event. (The below picture was taken with my Lumia 800 by the way and I’ve not edited it at all)
The day started off with meeting the fellow bloggers, the PR people and Ian Moulster who is a Product Manager at Microsoft UK. We were given a brief for the day that included 2 challenges for us bloggers; the first was to take photos from the London Eye and then ask our Twitter followers to name the building we photo’d and from where we too the photo, the second challenge was to make a PowerPoint about the day using the photos we took.
On board the London Eye we had to take photos of:
- St Paul’s Cathedral
- The BT Tower
- The Battersea Power Station
- The Shard
These photos were then stored on SkyDrive and shared to Twitter. I was at an advantage to the bloggers who didn’t have a Windows Phone as I could share my photo to Twitter and have it automatically save it SkyDrive. People using alternative devices had to upload the photo to SkyDrive and then share it to Twitter manually.
It is very easy to share anything from SkyDrive with people via several different ways. It is possible to email someone a link to a file or folder on SkyDrive or share via a social network (so long as the user has linked their Windows Live account with their social network account) and even generate a link to share anywhere, including Twitter. This is a relatively new feature and was introduced in one of the recent SkyDrive updates.
Below are the photos I took whilst on the London Eye.
Next up we had to make a PowerPoint presentation to show the others the photos we had taken. We started the PowerPoints in the feature rich PowerPoint Web App but I decided to then continue work on the PowerPoint on the desktop version. This gave me some additional customisation options, allowing me to make a Metro theme for the presentation. Because I had started the PowerPoint in the Web App and then opened it in the desktop version all I had to do was click the “save” button to save the updated version on my desktop back to the cloud. Users don’t have to manually upload a newer version of an Office document if the start editing a document on SkyDrive and then choose to open it up in the desktop version.
Below you can view the embedded PowerPoint I quickly cobbled together during the event.
There were some interesting points made during the event about SkyDrive. One that struck me was that there is no easy way to add a photo, or indeed any file, stored on SkyDrive to an Office Web App document. This seems to be an oversight and one I hope Microsoft addresses soon, this is certainly a feature that makes a lot of sense.
I had a very enjoyable day and despite knowing most of what was talked about and shown off I think it was a very beneficial day for all those who attended. I am looking forward to what else Microsoft has planned for SkyDrive and the Web Apps. If you are interested in keeping up to date with the latest SkyDrive news then you might want to check out the official Windows Live blog and check this out to find out more about SkyDrive.
