GeoFlow Viewer Please

Over the past week or so, I've seen a lot of people ask the following:

How can I provide my GeoFlow Tour for consumption in

• PowerPoint
• SharePoint
• My website
• A tablet
• Any mobile device?

I think it's great that people are asking these questions. It suggests that people want to use GeoFlow. The problem, is that currently there isn't a way, that I know of, to present GeoFlow tours in those above formats minus a tablet running Windows 8 (non-RT) with Excel 2013 Professional or certain versions of Office 365.

There are a lot of discussions about Microsoft needing a mobile BI strategy, and I agree. When I was at Dallas Day of Dot Net in February, I heard a presenter talking about how the PC era is dying and mobile is taking over. From my perspective, software developers not learning about mobile software development may find themselves not nearly as marketable as they used to be. I say this as someone with a lot of software development industry experience and not someone looking in from the outside.

Now back to BI, and GeoFlow specifically, what are some options for making GeoFlow consumable from the aforementioned devices and software? Let's consider Office 365. Office Mobile Viewers are already supported on iPhone, Android and Windows phones. GeoFlow, however, is not.  

Here are some ideas for the future:

• GeoFlow mobile viewer that works with Office 365. Thanks to Jen Stirrup for bringing to our attention that Office 365 may be a great direction for Microsoft to go with their mobile BI strategy. Jen's feedback was provided via comment on a blog post here.

• GeoFlow SharePoint web part for displaying GeoFlow tours

• Save to Animation option within GeoFlow. This should provide a good option for presenting GeoFlow data within a PowerPoint Presentation.

There were several people on-line that also mentioned wanting to see GeoFlow merged in with Power View and then providing a Power View Viewer. At least one person mentioned wanting to be able to build GeoFlow tours using mobile. The primary message, though, was GeoFlow consumption beyond Excel 2013 on a PC. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to take some of our GeoFlow ideas and put them into reality.

Update: GeoFlow has been renamed to Power Map and is scheduled to be part of Power BI for Office 365!