I am traveling this week for business and pleasure - and what better way to test the Microsoft Surface than run it through a real world test?
Baseline: My 'normal' travel gear includes a Dell laptop, Verizon MiFi, Windows Phone 7, Office 365 E3 and an iPad with an embedded cell card.
New Normal: Microsoft Surface, Verizon MiFi, Windows Phone 7, Office 365 E3.
Day 1 task: Prepare a PowerPoint for a meeting and have other staff members comment on the slides.
I powered my Surface up (instant boot). Connected to the Verizon MiFi using the settings charm and was online. I navigated to the SharePoint Online in Office 365 and downloaded the PowerPoint template to the Surface desktop. Opened up the PowerPoint template in PowerPoint 2013 and was able to add content in easily. This was a board report so I needed to post pictures, graphs, and other interactive content into the deck. This was accomplished very easily and without any snags.
I was pulled away from completing the presentation and needed to save it. I was able to save it directly to SharePoint from PowerPoint 2013 (this functionality has been in the Office Suite for a long time - but it is very prominent in 2013). When I came back and reopened the PowerPoint - it actually remembered where I had left off. A little creepy - but very cool.
My colleagues had made comments to the presentation and I was able to easily incorporate them into the final product.
I needed to share it with people outside my organization - and thought about using SkyDrive for sharing the slides. But...I decided that the recipients are not even close to being techy - so I sent it via the mail app in the Surface. While I don't like the app compared to Outlook - it was very easy to add the file to the email - something that is not as intuitive in the iPad mail app.
Verdict: Day one with just my Surface RT and I don't yet miss my iPad or my laptop.
