In this blog post, I wanted to share an extensibility tip which is super easy that any user can do without writing code – embed Office files in any web page, including blog posts, using the power of Office Online. This is a very simple, yet powerful way, of displaying dynamic spreadsheets, presentations and word documents. You can do this for documents stored in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

So how do you do it? In OneDrive, it’s very straightforward and visible in the standard navigation. You just go to http://www.onedrive.com, sign-in, select the file you want to embed and then click on “Embed” at the top to copy the HTML code. You also have the option to embed a folder under Folder Actions –> Embed Folder. So if you have a public folder, you can share it easily with everyone. If you want to embed a file, the key is to select the file so you get the Embed option in the top nav. This, as you would expect, respects the OneDrive security permissions that have been configured.

The actual code is below. The parameters are straightforward and you can easily change them.

<iframe src="https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=CA582F2BC3AD1590&resid=CA582F2BC3AD1590%2133463&authkey=AFh1O3tkDLAQzzw&em=2" width="402" height="327" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

So in this example, here’s my Copenhagen Ignite keynote presentation embedded in this blog post that I’ve shared with everyone:

You can do this for other Office file types as well. Here’s a demo Excel file hosted on my personal OneDrive in the same folder:

The TechNet team took advantage of the power of embedding Office files in web pages in their Office 365 service comparison page @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788955.

So what about embedding documents stored in OneDrive for Business? You can do the same thing – you just have to do a little more work to find the HTML code to embed the doc. Like before, security permissions are respected. For PowerPoint and Word files, you can find the HTML code in the document preview under the “Embed Information” option in the document library (see below).

Below is the code. This has more extraneous HTML code, but is similarly constructed with parameters for a document id, width and height. One thing that’s missing is an authkey. This code requires someone to be authenticated.

<iframe src='https://retreat-my.sharepoint.com/personal/katiej_retreat_onmicrosoft_com/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc={f19600ba-968f-4922-95e2-15c38051641f}&action=embedview&wdAr=1.7755102040816326&Embed=1' width='350px' height='221px' frameborder='0'>This is an embedded <a target='_blank' href='http://office.com'>Microsoft Office</a> presentation, powered by <a target='_blank' href='http://office.com/webapps'>Office Online</a>.</iframe>

For Excel files, there’s no UX to grab the HTML code. You need to take the HTML code from any PowerPoint/Word file and replace the sourcedoc GUID with the Excel file GUID. You can easily get the Excel GUID by viewing the Excel file with Excel Online – it will be in the URL string.

Here’s a screenshot of how I embedded a PowerPoint and Excel file hosted in my OneDrive for Business on a SharePoint page using Page Viewer web parts. As you would expect, when I embed the Excel file, I also get the App for Excel that was inserted into the file – very cool.

This is pretty straightforward when you’re looking to embed files in an authenticated intranet/extranet scenario, but how do you embed Office files hosted in OneDrive for Business in anonymous scenarios? Assuming your IT admin has allowed for external anonymous sharing (more info on that here), you need to select the file you want to share, choose share, choose “get a link” and then create a link. 

Here’s the guest link:

https://retreat-my.sharepoint.com/personal/katiej_retreat_onmicrosoft_com/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?guestaccesstoken=PGwTbjYxjgofpMWZGdILVEp7dYFkiW%2fK35sQZqNI3z4%3d&docid=0fb3ee47f64fa49e0828e732992c8fb51

You’ll notice that the guest access token and docid are parameters. You can use this to construct the embed HTML URL as follows:

<iframe height="221" src="https://retreat-my.sharepoint.com/personal/katiej_retreat_onmicrosoft_com/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?guestaccesstoken=PGwTbjYxjgofpMWZGdILVEp7dYFkiW%2fK35sQZqNI3z4%3d&docid=0fb3ee47f64fa49e0828e732992c8fb51&action=embedview" frameborder="0" width="350"></iframe>

For example, here’s the PowerPoint session hosted on my Office 365 demo tenant’s that I presented at WPC with my colleague Tanuj Bansal:

So have fun trying some of these tips out! It's clearly not for every scenario, but can be powerful to help tell your story, share content and let your customers analyze data on your web pages.

Given it's been 9 months, I thought I'd share what's top of mind for me and mention recent a handful of Office 365 updates:

 1. Continuous innovation and change management. One of the value propositions of the cloud is continuous innovation - that customers and partners get updates faster than they would with traditional on-premises software. And while that's absolutely the case with Office 365, we are committed to helping organizations manage this continuous change through visibility into our roadmap. Just a few weeks ago, we publicly published our Office 365 update roadmap @ http://www.office.com/roadmap. This lists some of the updates we're releasing over the next few months. While this is not comprehensive, it does give you a good sense of what you can expect coming to your service. We also launched the First Release program, that gives you an opportunity to experience some of the new features "First" -- as the name suggests. There's much more detailed information @ http://blogs.office.com/2014/06/19/improving-visibility-to-service-updates/.
 
 2.  Comparing Office 365 service options. A frequent question I get is, what service has what feature? And while we've had detailed service descriptions published on TechNet for some time, a nice gem is this spreadsheet view that lets you view features based on different pivots. Check it out @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/office365/fp123607

 3. Storage has gone up. We upped OneDrive for Business storage to 1TB! As a person who is an active user of OneDrive for Business and the consumer OneDrive service, I'm personally excited about this move. The SharePoint/OneDrive team is investing a lot in this space -- not just upping the number, but by making improvements based on feedback and thinking about new scenarios. From a new scenario perspective, you'll notice that Office 365 Video is on the roadmap.

 4. Message Center and the Service Health Dashboard. This is part of the blog post I referenced in point #1, but it's worth a separate mention. While Message Center has been in the service for several months, we've been making improvements with things like categorization and in-product alerts. Our vision is to make sure all relevant information to admins is available in the Message Center. Another investment we made to improve visibility is launching the Office 365 Admin app across all major smartphone platforms including iOS, WP and Android. Right now, the admin app is limited to a view of the Service Health Dashboard (SHD). You can expect this to include more information over time. Here's a blog post that has more information @ http://blogs.office.com/2013/12/12/office-365-admin-app-is-now-on-android-and-ios/. Speaking of SHD, we're going to make SHD information available through an API -- you should see more information on this in the roadmap - so stay tuned for that!

 5. Developer, developer, developer. We have a great prod mgmt and engineering team that is doing some really great things in a very open way - for example, we just open sourced the Open XML SDK @ http://blogs.office.com/2014/06/25/open-xml-sdk-goes-open-source/. We're also working with the community on many different projects - check them out @ https://github.com/search?q=office+365&ref=cmdform. If you missed SPC in March, this is a good blog post that highlights some of the recent investments @ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2014/03/03/overview-of-sharepoint-conference-2014-and-new-content-for-developers.aspx.

 6. Trust and security are very important. Trust and security may not be a sexy topic for everyone, but it's a very important topic that we invest in heavily across the board. This is a not just a feature area for us, it's a fundamental design principle. We recently updated our Trust Center @ http://trust.office365.com with new content (check out the security whitepaper) and videos.

 7. Join the community! We launched a new, open Yammer community for Office 365 techies. More information @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_community_blog/archive/2014/04/17/introducing-the-office-365-it-pro-network.aspx. This is not just for IT professionals -- even though that's what it says on the blog - it's for developers and tech enthusiasts as well.  Speaking of community, I will be at WPC presenting a session on the Office 365 partner investments we're making. We'll be sharing new experiences beyond what we shipped a few months ago @ http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/28/introducing-the-new-office-365-partner-admin-center/

While life and work are both moving at cloud speed, I'm making a personal commitment to myself to blog more often! The good news is that my team has been doing an excellent job posting feature updates @ http://blogs.office.com over the last 12+ months, so we haven't missed a beat on sharing what's new with Office 365.

Hope to see some of you at WPC! 

What’s exciting is that this solution includes over 500 videos across Office 365 including SharePoint, Office client and Web Apps and the Point8020 team adds more videos that show up magically when new features are released. I was also impressed with the maturity and functionality of Point8020's learning platform that delivers all this training. The platform allows customers to add their own custom training content/videos, provides analysis on all training usage and lets them target learning content to where it is most needed. It also has a rich JavaScript API that developers can plug into to create their own learning solutions. 

If you’re an Office 365 customer interested in end user training, definitely check it out @ http://point8020.com/ShowMeOffice365InAction.aspx

We will frequently write feature blog posts, host informative Garage series shows, write editorial pieces on broader investments we’re making and publish monthly roll-up blog posts that highlight features we ship in a particular month. This content is written by Office 365 product managers and program managers with the goal of providing you with the latest information on the service. I also encourage all of you to ask questions by commenting on the relevant blog post and we’ll make every effort to answer your question.

If you haven’t been following the blog, you may have missed some of the latest features we’ve shipped and are shipping soon. Some of my personal favorites include Office Mobile for iPhone, real-time Office Web App co-authoring and SkyDrive Pro Apps for Windows 8 and iOS.

Here’s a list of my personal favorite Office 365 features that I use on almost a daily basis. Of course, this is a snapshot in time since the service is always changing and is by no mean comprehensive of what Office 365 has to offer. In no particular order:

1. Office 365 ProPlus.

My last post was focused on this area of innovation. Office 365 ProPlus delivers the power and familiarity of Office on your PC and Mac (along with being very touch friendly) with all the deployment benefits of SaaS software. It supports side-by-side installation with older versions of Office, deploys to your PC and Mac very, very quickly and gives IT deployment flexibility. If you’re an IT professional, you can learn more about the value of Office 365 ProPlus through the Garage series @ http://www.microsoft.com/garage which is hosted by Jeremy Chapman on my team.

2. SkyDrive Pro.

I absolutely love SkyDrive Pro. It’s SkyDrive for the enterprise built on the SharePoint platform. You can access all your documents (personal, team, org) from the browser, desktop or mobile devices. In the screenshot below, at the top right, you can see a Sync action that brings your documents down to your device giving you offline access. I also have access to my SkyDrive Pro content on my Windows Phone device through the Office hub – very cool.

3. Office Web Apps.

Excel Web App, Word Web App, PowerPoint Web App and OneNote Web App are beautiful and powerful apps (Outlook Web App gets it’s own call-out). When I’m on the go (for example, using the machine at the Executive Briefing Center), I use the Web Apps to view, present and edit my documents. I never have to worry about file fidelity and I can access the same documents from Office 365 ProPlus when I’m using my PC or Surface Pro. I can also collaborate with my peers irrespective of how they are accessing the documents – Web Apps, Office 365 ProPlus, mobile, etc. Below, you’ll see screenshots of the Excel Web App and Word Web App which look great. You can use the browser of your choice and Web Apps also work great on mobile platforms. One question I frequently get is whether iPad is supported and the answer is yes.

4. Outlook Web App    

The new Outlook Web App, or more affectionately referred to as OWA, delivers a beautiful experience. I personally use OWA on my Surface RT device and it works great. User experience enhancements include a touch-friend interface, intuitive threading, in-place reply functionality (no pop-ups when replying), Outlook apps (more on that in point #5) and more.

5. Office Apps     

In the latest Office 365 update, we introduced a new developer cloud model that fully embraces web standards. This new model is a win-win-win for IT, developers and end users. Developers can develop apps that work for on-prem & Office 365 and easily publish them to the Office store, IT can have confidence that these apps will run safely and end-users can easily add apps from the Office store. This new app model spans across SharePoint, Exchange and the Office client.  More information can be found @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps/fp160950.aspx

One example is the Bing Maps Outlook app (see below) that shows you an inline map for an address in an email address. Another example is the “Suggested Meetings” app that gets displayed if there’s date/time information in the email body. This app will help you schedule a meeting by directly populating the date/time information in a calendar appointment request. Really great stuff and both these apps ship out-of-the-box. You can also check out other apps that developers have written at the Office store @ http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/store/ 

6. People Everywhere

People is a core focus in Office 365. Whether you are using a browser or the Office clients, you get a consistent People Card that aggregates information from different sources and allows you to quickly interact with the person. The screenshots below show just a few examples of where the People card shows up. The first screenshot is the People Card in OWA, the second one in Outlook client and the third is in SharePoint.

Besides giving a consistent, great end user experience, we also make it easy for IT to manage the user directory. We offer different options depending on your business requirements – for example, 1) you can host your entire, sole directory in the cloud, 2) synchronize users/passwords with your on-premise Active Directory (AD) or 3) implement ADFS for a single-sign on experience. We also support a number of 3rd party Identity partners to help you integrate with your existing Identity infrastructure.

7. Yammer and Social    

Yammer and SharePoint deliver powerful enterprise social capabilities. There’s been a lot of communication on this topic so I won’t write much on this topic. We recently provided an update to the roadmap which you can find @ http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/03/19/yammer-and-sharepoint-enterprise-social-roadmap-update.aspx

8. Security and Rights Management    

We continuously invest in security. We take every measure to secure your data through 1) built-in Data Center security (eg. 24-hour monitoring, isolated customer data, secure network, encryption, automated operations) and 2) Office 365 customer controls (eg. antivirus/antispam, user access control, compliance, advanced encryption). I encourage you to explore the Office 365 Trust Center @ http://www.trustoffice365.com and read the Office 365 Security whitepaper @ Office 365 Security.

One of the hidden gems of Office 365 is Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM allows you to apply policies to data (eg. email, Office documents) so that content is protected even when it leaves Office 365. The first two screenshots show how easy it is for an end user to set permissions on an email through OWA or the Outlook client. The third screenshot demonstrates how a policy can be set at a document library level. So when a user downloads a document, the policy is included as part of the document. So for example, if you apply a “Do not print” policy on the document library, when a user downloads a Word document, they won’t be able to print the document from their desktop – very, very cool! The IRM value doesn’t stop at the end user level --- IT can also set up rules, for example by setting a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy, that defines when an email should be rights protected based on certain defined criteria. I always make it a point to mention that IRM is more than just encryption.

9. Compliance Features

Compliance features are features I personally don’t use on a daily basis as an end user, but I do know that Microsoft and other organizations do. New compliance features in Office 365 give you confidence that your organization is complying with corporate and legal policies. Features span areas of data loss prevention (DLP), eDiscovery, auditing and reporting. In the example below, there’s a DLP policy that checks outgoing email for credit card information.

10. Regular Updates

We’re delivering new features and enhancements on a monthly basis. This can range from minor fixes to enabling new scenarios. With Office 365, we’re able to react to customer feedback much more quickly. My team publishes some of the new features we release on a monthly basis @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/office_365_service_updates/default.aspx. One recent new feature that we announced is GeoFlow for Excel (currently in Preview),  that I recommend checking out if you haven’t done so already @ http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2013/04/11/public-preview-of-geoflow-for-excel-delivers-3d-data-visualization-and-storytelling.aspx

I’ve limited myself to only 10 feature areas – there are a lot more. I encourage you to try out Office 365 for yourself if you haven’t done so already. You can sign-up for a trial @ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx. 

On a more personal note, I’m going to make it a point to blog more often!

The new Office delivers a modern experience across PC, tablets, browsers and smartphones without compromise. Whether you’re on your Windows machine or on the go, you can sign in and quickly get access to the latest version of Office with your personalized settings and documents.

On all your Windows PCs and tablets, you can install Office quickly from the Internet. Your Office is always up-to-date with the latest features and takes advantage of your local machine hardware including compute power, graphics and storage allowing you to work the way you want when you’re connected to the Internet and offline. The new Office user experience is optimized for touch, keyboard, mouse and pen. It’s designed to put the content front and center allowing you to read, create and interact with beautiful documents. You just have to sign in to your Office with your ID and you will immediately have access to your recent files and settings stored in the cloud. It will even point you to the last position you were reading in a document on any PC you use.

When you’re on the go and have access to a browser, all you have to do is sign in to SkyDrive and use the latest version of Office Web Apps to view, edit and create beautiful Office documents. We’ll make sure document fidelity is maintained at all times. If you’re on the go and have access to a Windows PC, you can take advantage of Office on Demand - a new way to quickly deliver rich Office applications to a PC very quickly using application streaming technology. Office on Demand streams and launches a temporary copy of an Office app without installing it and when you log off, the application and the files you were working on are deleted. On mobile devices, we also offer great experiences that I will write about in the future.

I highly recommend trying it out yourself @ http://www.office.com/preview ! Another benefit of the new Office is that you can install it side-by-side with an older version of Office, making it very easy for you to try out. :-)

Office 365 for Government.  Office 365 for Government is a new multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud. You get all the rich functionality that Exchange, SharePoint and Lync have to offer at very attractive pricing.

Office 365 for Education. We offer Office 365 for Education A2 plan for free! This is incredible value for education institutes. Microsoft has a history of providing great value to education, and this is just another example. To learn more about the different plans, check out @ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/edu

Security and Standards. We support a wide array of industry standards including ISO-27001, EU Model clauses, HIPAA-BAA and FISMA—just to name a few. Check out the new, improved Office 365 Trust Center to learn more.

Geo Expansion. Office 365 is available in 88 countries and 32 languages and we’re looking to expand even more in the future.

Feature Improvements. We have been adding value to Office 365 on a monthly basis based on customer and partner feedback. You can follow the updates @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/office_365_service_updates/974.aspx.

If you’re a Microsoft customer or partner and haven’t checked out Office 365, I highly recommend checking it out. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it – feel free to tweet me @arpanshah.

While I am super excited about my new role, I will miss being part of the Project team. The Project team is one of the best teams I’ve been a part of at Microsoft – great people, great technology and great community. It has truly been a pleasure & honor to lead the business for the last 1.5+ years.

Looking forward to an exciting future for Office 365!

Arpan Shah
Director, Office 365 Suites