Say you just need to share a presentation with a colleague or two. Say you want to just fire up a slide show and share it. Well, that's where the PowerPoint Broadcast Service comes in, and it's part of Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2010. If you've followed my instructions to install Office Web Apps from my previous post, you're just a couple clicks away. The first thing you need is a Broadcast site collection. This site collection acts as a target host that'll allow others that can access your site collection to see your presentation. Think a real quick-and-dirty slide show to a few folks. So, what do we need to do?
Well, first off we need to create a new site collection. Fire up Central Administration and create a new site collection, and then select the Enterprise tab, and pick PowerPoint Broadcast Site.
Fill in all the other information as normal and off you go. At the end, you now have a Broadcast site collection.
Next, open up in PowerPoint 2010 a deck you want to share. Once opened, select the Slide Show tab, and you'll see the Broadcast Slide Show option (see below). Click that.
You'll then see the Broadcast Slide Show information window appear with the requisite license agreeement, a quick description of the service, and buttons to change the service to use, start the service, or cancel. Since this is our first time click <Change Broadcast Service>.
Select Add a new service as this is the first time we're using it...
Now, enter the URL of the site collection that we first created. Click <Add> when done.
After adding it, it appears in the list of services to choose. Click it and then click <Start Broadcast>.
You'll then be displayed a link to send out to your colleagues. Copy paste that into your email, IM, etc. to share, and then click <Start Slide Show>.
Now, your view will be the normal PowerPoint Slide Show view, but those you shared the link with will see it in their browser. Simple, eh?
Enjoy! - M