Configuring PowerPoint broadcast in Office 2010

PowerPoint broadcasting is a pretty awesome new feature in Office 2010, it will allow you to publish your slide show to world through the Windows Live PowerPoint broadcast service, which is driven by the Office 2010 Web Applications. Given that we can install the Office Web Apps on to a SharePoint 2010 server, this also means we can use that for a private broadcast rather than pushing our slides out to the internet. In this post I wanted to talk a little about how we set that up. I’m assuming that you already have a SharePoint 2010 environment with Office Web Applications installed on it to begin with.

The first thing you need to do when you want to broadcast from SharePoint is to create a broadcast site. This is a special kind of site that PowerPoint will recognise as a broadcast target and let the web application run the broadcast from. If you look at it there isn’t actually anything in the site, but there is one thing to be aware of here, and that is the permissions.

Basically there are two groups to this site – “Broadcast Presenters” and “Broadcast Attendees”, and these groups do exactly what they sound like – they allow you to control who is able to create broadcasts, and who can view them. In a large organisation this might allow some scenarios around things like having a team who are working on a private project to be able to control who can view presentations that are broadcast at that site, meaning even if people share the broadcast URL around internally, you still know exactly who can view it. You could set up multiple broadcast sites to suit the security needs of your users.

Once you have the broadcast site set up, you need to tell PowerPoint about it, and there are a couple of ways of doing this. One – you can let your users manually add a broadcast site,which they can do by selecting to broadcast a presentation,and instead of choosing a target from the list (which by default just has the windows live option) they can add a new source, providing just the URL of the broadcast site that we talked about earlier. Personally I don’t like this option, and that’s because I don’t like having to get users to do things – they have a habit of breaking things! The better option is to use group policy.

If you grab the PowerPoint 2010 Administrative template you can get some options that will help you configure PowerPoint for your users (this is documented on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431688.aspx). Basically we can add the sources for the users here and let group policy roll it out for us. We can also do things like prevent the user from using other broadcast sites than the ones provided for them by you (again, think back to the security options on the broadcast site – if you prevent the user from adding sources than the ones they are supposed to use that have appropriate security configured, then you’re really just preventing them from hurting themselves really aren’t you!).

So there you have it, some food for thought for the SharePoint admins – if you have rolled out the Office Web Applications make sure you go through and configure these settings to help out your users, happy broadcasting!

For further info on configuring PowerPoint broadcasting, see the articles on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431686.aspx.