Whenever I explain my use of Office 2.0 technologies, the person I am talking to usually points to one Microsoft Office application that he or she could not live without, be it Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook. Reasons expressed vary, but they tend to revolve around a couple of specific features that are a little bit too advanced to be supported by Office 2.0 alternatives today. In such instances, I point to a couple of unique features offered by Office 2.0 for the same application, and try to contrast their benefits to the ones offered by the aforementioned must-have Office 1.0 features. More often than not, it does the trick, as was the case this week for Microsoft PowerPoint.

Building a better PowerPoint for Office 2.0 won’t be about matching PowerPoint’s capabilities for complex layouts or fancy animations. As was introduced in this earlier article, a good Office 2.0 alternative to PowerPoint should make it easier for presenters to share their presentations online and give them live to a remote audience, without the hassle of having to configure web conferencing tools such as WebEx. It should also make it easier to develop presentations in a collaborative manner, and reuse existing pieces of content across multiple presentations.

A killer feature for an Office 2.0 presentation tool will be the ability to fetch structured data syndicated by other Office 2.0 tools, such as tables and charts generated by Google Spreadsheets or Zoho Sheet. Every month, I have to build presentations for my Board of Directors meeting, and they usually include financial data pulled from Salesforce.com or Zoho Sheet. I sure would pay a lot of money for this to be done live, and I would not really mind if the look and feel is not exactly as good as what I could do with PowerPoint. As much as I like things to look good, function matters more than form in the business world, and this is a good thing — most of the time anyway.

Another killer feature will be the automation of the invitation process for remote presentations such as webinars. If I were to live in Office 2.0 dreamland, I would have my list of participants stored in Salesforce.com or Zoho CRM, my presentation provided by Thumbstacks.com or Zoho’s upcoming presentation tool, and a single click from my CRM tool would fire invitations and reminders to participants in the form of emails that would include the URL for the presentation and ways to get on the conference call, using Skype for example. At anytime, participants would also be able to download multiple versions of the presentation, one in native PowerPoint format, another in PDF, and yet another as a presentation that could play itself when launched from any web browser. All versions would also provide links back to the various pieces of syndicated content that were used in the presentation, letting users follow-up on their own within areas of content that interest them the most.

Once such features become available, users will realize the benefits offered by online alternatives to traditional office productivity tools, and they will quickly forget about the features they once thought to be indispensable. Then, they’ll switch over. I do not know how far we are from dreamland, but I sure hope we’ll get there soon.

UPDATE 6/13/2006: David Berlin wrote a great article on the subject.