User Review: Microsoft Sway and Microsoft Teams

Sway and teams are software developed by Microsoft, and both come as the part of Microsoft 356 family of products but are used for completely different things. In this section I will write about those two software, and their features I find most useful and interesting.

SWAY

Sway is web-hosted software used for presentations and it allows user (with Microsoft account) to create presentable website by combining text and media, like photos, videos and etc. The software was officially released in 2015 and it offers amazing features. Sway sites are stored on Microsoft's servers and can be viewed and edited from any web browser through Office on the web.

Most import Sway features:

1. Simple to create effective communications tools

• Drag and drop system- easy to put together all material
• Formatting functions- allows user to focus on the content rather than layout
• Image suggestion- offers the appropriate images for your content
• Ability to upload content from documents and content from the internet
• Internal search function- users are able to add content from various internet sources like Bing, Facebook, One Drive, YouTube, etc.

2. Ease of sharing information

• Your presentation is accessible on any internet- connected device at any time, and your audience can view your presentation online without need of downloading it.
• Sway presentations are shared via link and creator has a full control of it- what access people have, can they edit it or view it.
• Easy to share on social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, and automatically updated after the presentation is edited.

3. Efficient and effective collaboration

• You can easily work with co-workers or colleague on a same presentation even if you are not based on same location.

4. Auto save

• Sway auto-saves all the work you do, and a presentation will save even if your computer crashes.

INTERFACE

Sway includes following top-level pages:

1.  The Home page

• Displays tutorials, examples, and related links.

2. My Sways

• Lists all the Sways related with the account you used to sign in.

3. Authoring

• Create or edit a selected Sway.

4. Play

• View your presentation in a slide show.

When authoring in Sway, you work in four main areas:

1. The top navigation bar, which includes Play, Share, and app-level options.

2. The menu bar, which displays Insert.

3. Story-line, where you add, import, edit, format or arrange the content.

4. Design, which shows how your finished presentation looks like.

Even though, Sway is relatively 'new' to Microsoft family and is not widely used, it offers amazing features and tools that can provide content, design and layout for your presentation. . Sway is the 'top one' software for creating presentations that I tried to use so far. I would definitely recommend it to someone who doesn't have a lot of experience in creating presentations or is struggling with finding the content.

                                    Tutorial: Using Sway

TEAMS

Microsoft announced Team, web-based desktop app, in 2017, and since its lunch it has become the fastest growing app in Microsoft's history (used by more than 330,000 companies worldwide). Platform was developed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub- combination of Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform, and is considered as one of the top collaboration and productivity tools available for business and organisations of all sizes.