GigaOM » Collaboration

How tablets can make meetings less painful

Erica Ogg — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:07:21 +0000

Those of you who hate meetings and can’t stand endless PowerPoint-based presentations, there’s hope. Todd Barr, chief marketing officer of Alfresco had some encouraging solutions for how to improve them at GigaOM’s Net:Work 2011 conference on Thursday: use tablets. He says they can help turn meeting presenters and attendees into active, focused participants, and can make meetings themselves more efficient and all around less painful.

Barr wasn’t pitching any of his own Alfresco products, just giving advice for how to change our current office and work culture that tends to revolve around constant meetings and slide deck presentations. Here are his suggestions for why you should consider incorporating tablets into them:

Interact with tablet apps. PowerPoint presentations offer information, but with little way for the audience to engage in what’s being presented. His solution: an iPad app like Idea Flight, which puts presentations on tablets in front of each participant. “It democratizes meetings,” said Barr. “So you’re collaborating and working with peers and not just absorbing someone else’s points.”
Avoid oversimplification. Simple isn’t always better. Some topics are just too complex for a series of bullet points or “don’t fit into 7.5 by 10 PowerPoint dimensions,” noted Barr. He suggested another app called Roambi Flow, which allows presenters to embed data in the slides they’re introducing that can be manipulated by the presenter or meeting attendees. Apps like these, he said, allow meeting participants “not to present data, but to explore the data.”
Force them to focus. Barr noted that it’s hard to compete for attention when everyone you’re presenting to at a meeting has their laptop open, each of their screens likely a mess of browser windows, emails, documents and other files. With the way the iPad works, it forces you to focus because you’re only in one app at a time. So using and iPad app that meeting attendees can use along with ”allows us to get out of the ADD, and allows us to focus instead of multitask,” he said.

As more companies incorporate “bring your own device” policies that allow employees to use iPads or tablets on the corporate network, or even as they start purchasing tablets for their increasingly mobile workers, Barr’s ideas seem like something to take into serious consideration.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Iongrid brings Office apps securely to iPad

Barb Darrow — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:00:17 +0000

As employees tote their own devices into the enterprise, Iongrid’s Nexus software promises to bring Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets to their iPads with what it calls “pixel perfect” fidelity, and in a way that won’t give the corporate compliance department a collective heart attack.

That’s no small feat. C-level execs loved Apple’s iPads from day one, almost immediately forcing their IT departments to support the devices whether they wanted to or not. That worked okay except for two things. First, PowerPoint slides et al. did not display well on iPads without a third-party reader. Second, the proliferation of internal documents emailed or downloaded to iPads gives compliance officers fits.

Iongrid says the Nexus client-server application layers security atop existing Active Directory server-based policies to let authorized execs including salesmen who need to take presentations on the road, display their documents with great fidelity on their iPads.

Nexus, which debuts Tuesday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, securely streams documents to the iPad for viewing. The user can then manipulate those documents using the usual iPad gestures. The initial release allows viewing only, although within weeks users will be able to annotate or lightly edit the documents as well, said Nick Triantos, CEO and founder of Iongrid and former chief software architect for NVIDIA.

“We keep a proxy of the document in memory and a list of changes to that document. Then, when you reconnect, we apply those changes to the original,” Triantos said.

If IT policy allows, people will also be able to take their documents off-line in which case the local copy on the device will be encrypted, he added.

The potential opportunity is big. The iPad leads the market in tablets, and is a particular favorite among the aforementioned high-level execs. And, many, many companies store their shared Microsoft Office applications in SharePoint repositories.

Typically what happens now when execs want to take their documents on the road, they email them to Gmail and then call them up on the iPad where the documents won’t render correctly without a special reader. Or they save the Office docs to Dropbox or some other cloud-based repository but the display problem remains the same. Sometimes an assistant would convert the required document to PDF and then download that — a “ridiculously labor intensive,” process — Triantos said.

Nexus’ server component enforces existing permissions and security levels set in Active Directory but can add more layers, said Michael Rothrock, Iongrid’s VP of product.

“Active Directory doesn’t know the user location, but we do, so if a user is off campus or abroad, we can enforce a new subset of security based on IP address and the iPad’s GPS information,” he said.

Pricing is $15 per user per month with volume discounts available.

Iongrid was founded in 2010 by Triantos, Rothrock and Ben de Waal, who is CTO. It’s privately funded by angel investors including Simon Crosby and Nigel Stokes. Crosby is CTO of Bromium (and founder and former CTO of XenSource, now part of Citrix); Stokes is chairman of AppZero and former CEO of DataMirror (acquired by IBM in 2007.)

Analyst Peter Christy, co-founder of the Internet Research Group, said Iongrid is attacking a meaty problem. Apple iPads were designed for 20-year olds who want to share everything. Business users have different needs, and since two to four percent of laptops or tablets are lost or stolen, these users need higher security standards.

“Oftentimes a thief can turn off the radio on a device before anyone from the home office can wipe it clean,” he said. Iongrid Nexus can alleviate those security concerns.

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Knoodle Makes Cloud-Based Training a Cinch

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:03:41 +0000

How do you get all your remote team members on the same page? When it comes to online training and learning, finding the right tool — or set of tools — to easily put together a robust presentation can present a challenge.

Sure, there are web conferencing services, such as GoToMeeting, where you can share your desktop, present audio over phone or VoIP, and even push out polls, but what if you want to produce a more media-rich presentation that you can share with your virtual team for training purposes? And archive it? And repurpose it?

Knoodle offers a training solution that provides a presentation with a split screen; you can have text or PowerPoint slides on one side of the screen and video on the other, then sync the video and audio with the slides so they automatically advance at the right time. The Knoodle presentations are more engaging than screencasts or audio slideshows.

You can combine multiple assets — PowerPoint slideshows, video, images and text — and also add also add test quizzes or surveys into your presentations to allow viewers to become active participants in the information exchange. You can capture video as you produce your presentation with your web cam, or opt not to use the video component and just sync up audio.

Once your rich-media presentation is complete, you can share a link to it, export it as an MP4 file and email it, or embed it on your site, your blog, or within your intranet. You can also reuse and repurpose assets you’ve uploaded to create new presentations quickly and easily. As an admin, you can create and manage groups, invite group members,and manage and track who has viewed the presentation you’ve created. You can share the presentations internally (for training your team, for example) or externally (for providing publicly accessible training, demos and educational tools).

Knoodle offers a 30-day free trial. Pricing ranges from $14.99/month to $149.99/month, based on usage and the number of people watching the presentations. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

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Add Interactive Features to Presentations With SlideRocket

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The web-based presentation application SlideRocket has enhanced its tools for interactivity and collaboration. Users can now incorporate interactive elements into their presentations, in addition to traditional graphics. For example, a presentation might include a plugin showing a real-time Twitter stream. In addition, one can include polls directly into presentations, as well as a commenting system, so that viewers can post questions directly on slides. One can also include audio narration.

Users within an organization can have access to shared folders and libraries that they can use to put together presentations that are customized to a specific audience while retaining the organization’s graphic look and content. So, for example, if a salesperson uses a particular slide containing statistics and that data changes, it can be updated in one place; all presentations using that slide will be updated accordingly. Similarly, if a company changes its logo or graphic design, presentations can be automatically changed to reflect the new look.

SlideRocket was one of the first services to be integrated with Google Apps; users can incorporate documents and spreadsheets directly into presentations. Existing presentations can be imported from PowerPoint and Google Presentation.

The interface for putting together presentations is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Without leaving SlideRocket, one can search for images through Flickr, or through its own library of stock images.

Presentations can be made public, embedded into web pages, or can be shared with specific colleagues or clients. SlideRocket offers detailed analytics that allow tracking of who looked at what. And yes, presentations can also be printed or turned into PDFs; of course, interactivity will be lost.

At present, SlideRocket presentations continue to be Flash-based. However, the developer is preparing an HTML5 version that will be available on platforms, like the iPad, that don’t support Flash.

You can see a sample presentation or a video. Pricing plans include a free “lite” version with limited features, a “pro” version for $24 per user per month, and an “enterprise” version that is priced per user. A 14-day trial is available. Google Apps admins can make the trial or full version available to their users through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Do you use SlideRocket? What do you think?

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WWD Screencast: 280 Slides

Simon Mackie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:00:11 +0000

280 Slides is a free presentation web app that’s a bit like having a a version of PowerPoint right inside your browser. It makes it super-easy to create and share presentations online. You can also import and export PowerPoint files from within the app. It’s powerful and simple to use, and as it’s based on the Cappuccino web framework, it doesn’t require any browser plug-ins to work.

I am very impressed with it, and have made a quick screencast showing how it works:

If you need to create a presentation, it’s well worth giving 280 Slides a try.

Have you tried using 280 Slides to create a presentation?

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Track PowerPoint Changes With Workshare Compare for PowerPoint

Meryl K Evans — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:40 +0000

One of my favorite and most often-used features in Microsoft Word is Track Changes. For the uninitiated, Track Changes lets the document creator see what changes an editor makes to an original document. Unfortunately, while PowerPoint has a Review tab, it is limited to adding comments — it has no Track Changes feature. So reviewers have to get creative in referencing the original content and then making note of suggested changes using comments.

Workshare Compare for PowerPoint gives you the ability to compare two PowerPoint files and see the differences between them. While it doesn’t track changes while you edit the PowerPoint file, like Word does, it does give you the ability to see the changes that have been made between versions of a presentation.

You can select which version of the slide (either original or modified) you wish to keep right inside Workshare, much like Word’s accept/reject feature. The interface clearly shows which is which, and outlines the changes in the detailed summary at the bottom. The easy-to-use interface takes no effort to figure out, so you can get right to work. I made a quick screencast to show you how it works:

The biggest drawback to Workshare is the cost of a license. (A 14-day free trial is available.) One license of Workshare Compare for PowerPoint retails for ~~$199~~$145 per license per user for one year. If you don’t renew the license, the software stops working. (Note: There are two editions of Workshare Compare, one of which is for PowerPoint and the other for comparing PDF and Word documents.)

Personally, I don’t edit PowerPoint presentations enough to justify this cost on an annual basis, and I believe that many people will agree with me. Those who edit and share PowerPoint presentations on a regular basis and frequent presenters will benefit most from the application, but the subscription-based fee may be a barrier.

Have you tried Workshare Compare for PowerPoint? Do you think it is worth the cost?

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Prezi: Presentations With a Twist

Thursday Bram — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:00:05 +0000

Just about every presentation app works the same way: Whether you rely on Powerpoint, Keynote or another presentation application, you’re sharing a series of slides that progress in a linear fashion. While you can craft beautiful presentations, you’re up against a format that never changes. One web-based application is working on changing that, though: Prezi has an intuitive interface for both building a presentation and sharing it with your audience.

One Big Page

Where a typical presentation is based on individual slides with a set progression, the starting point for a Prezi presentation is one big page. On this blank canvas, you place all of your elements for the entire presentation — images, text, even multimedia. Organizing this information is not a question of linear progression. Instead, you add paths between different elements; you can choose to start with a main idea and then jump to an image off of the far side of the page. Prezi uses a “path” tool to let you create a moving presentation that starts at one thought and moves to the next. If you want to change that order, or zoom in on a particular part of one of your images or ideas, you can handle those alterations on the fly.

The ability to zoom in and out during a presentation is one of the most important features on Prezi. By sizing information according to importance, you can communicate on levels far beyond a simple slideshow — while still being able to move in and look at the details of a concept. Moving between different parts of the presentation with changing sizes can also add an element of animation without relying on cheesy transitions between individual slides.

Prepping With Prezi

Prezi’s interface for building new presentations is incredibly intuitive: In one corner of your web browser, you’ll find a set of options mostly focused on placing items within your presentation. Adjusting the size, placement and angle of any item in your presentation is just a matter of clicking on that item and dragging one of the three sets of circles that appear. It takes only a moment to get used to the interface. There is a tutorial that you can watch, but you can pick up the skill of building a presentation in Prezi with just a minute or two of clicking around.

It’s a fast way to create a presentation, and it offers new opportunities if you need to customize one presentation for multiple audiences. Rather than adding or deleting slides, it’s a matter of choosing which sections of your presentation you want to zoom in on; by changing the path your presentation follows around that big page Prezi offers you, you can simply avoid any material you want to exclude and focus in on those parts you want to include. Put all the information in there from the beginning and you can customize your presentations in a matter of minutes.

Practical Prezi

Prezi offers several different levels of pricing. With the free version, you can create 100MB worth of presentations, but they’ll all be public. The two premium options offer an increased amount of space, as well as the ability to make your presentations private. The Pro version also offers an offline editor. All three options provide access to an offline player, just in case you are presenting somewhere without Internet access.

Has Prezi spiced up your presentation? Share your tips in the comments.

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OffiSync Brings Google Docs Goodies to MS Office

Simon Mackie — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:30:39 +0000

Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft Office had the collaborative and cloud storage functionality of Google Docs? Well, now it does, using a free add-in called OffiSync that launched into public beta today. Offisync adds a toolbar to Office that allows you to use Google Docs for file storage and collaboration.

Once installed, Offisync adds a new toolbar to your Office apps. (Offisync works with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations.)

The Offisync toolbar

First, you need to configure Offisync with your Google account details using the “Accounts” button. Offisync supports multiple accounts, so if you use both Google Docs and Google Apps, you can easily switch between them.

You can then use Google Docs as an online repository for your Office documents. Click on “Save As” in the Offisync toolbar and you get access to a file menu showing your Google Docs account. As well as being able to save files, you can add, rename and delete folders.

Once your document is saved, you can access it from any browser through Google Docs, or open it up again in Office. You can also use Offisync to edit your existing Google Docs files in Office.

One of the best things about Google Docs is how easy it makes sharing your documents with others and collaborating on them. Offisync brings that power right inside Office. Click on “Collaborate” and you can choose to share your document with anyone else through Google Docs. If they also have Offisync isntalled, they’ll be able to work on the document in Office, too.

Offisync: A document in Office and Google Docs

Offisync’s not perfect, because Google Docs doesn’t have quite the same functionality as Office — it doesn’t support tracked changes and turns some objects into images, for example — but for most documents it works very well. The next version of Office will hopefully have cloud storage and collaboration functionality included, but until it’s released, Offisync is a great interim measure.

The Offisync beta is free to download and use, and works with Office 2003 and Office 2007 on XP, Vista and Windows 7. It also requires .NET Framework 3.5, so if you don’t have that already, it will be downloaded as part of the install. There’s a demo video available if you’d like to see it in action before trying it out.

Have you tried Offisync? What did you think?

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SlideRocket Opens Services Directory

Scott Blitstein — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:00:01 +0000

We’ve been considerably impressed with SlideRocket in our coverage over the last year. Allowing you to create knockout presentations with integrated asset management and analytics, it’s a no-brainer solution for your presentation needs.

One of the most interesting features they announced in their last major release was the SlideRocket marketplace, a solution that lets you purchase content for your presentation from within the application. This past week they opened this up even more, with the addition of the SlideRocket Services Directory.

The Services Directory lets users connect with certified providers who can offer creative expertise in areas like design, copy writing, photography and more, all from right within the application. The collaboration functionality already built in to SlideRocket makes the process easy.

I’m a big fan of this trend to introduce and facilitate the connection between user and provider. It’s a win-win, offering customized presentation services to users and an additional outlet for web workers to offer our wares.

As it is a relatively new service, now might could be a great time for creative agencies and freelancers to align themselves with SlideRocket and establish yourself as an expert early on. The fact that it is a powerful platform and a joy to work with make it an even more compelling opportunity.

SlideRocket has also added two new content providers to the Marketplace. The addition of Andertoons and PresentationPro add to the offerings already available from Fotolia and Mimeo.

If you’re a service provider interested in a listing in the Services Directory, more information can be gained by emailing marketplace@sliderocket.com. Listings are free but premium placement advertising and opportunity are in the pipeline.

Are you using SlideRocket? Are your services a fit for its Services Directory?

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DocVerse: Easy MS Office Document Sharing and Collaboration

Simon Mackie — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:00:50 +0000

One of the great things about apps like Google Docs and Zoho is how easy they make it to collaborate with others. No more emailing a Word 2007 document to a colleague only to find they’re using Word 97 — or even worse, that sinking feeling that comes with the realization that you and your colleagues have all been working on different revision versions. New startup DocVerse aims to bring the kind of easy cross-platform sharing and collaboration you get with Google Docs to Microsoft Office users.

I took the beta version of DocVerse for a spin today, and first impressions are good.

DocVerse promises easy document sharing and collaboration and it does just that: you get one-click syncing of documents from with Office and the ability to collaborate on documents with people who don’t have Office installed. Notably, it’s currently limited to PowerPoint 2007 users; DocVerse plans to roll out support for Word, Excel and Office 2003 later this spring.

You start by downloading and installing the software, and setting up a DocVerse account. DocVerse installs an add-on for PowerPoint, which adds a new pane to your PowerPoint window:

DocVerse pane in PowerPoint window

To start sharing the presentation, you just click the large “Add to DocVerse” button. The file gets uploaded to your DocVerse account. From now on, every time you save the file, it is synced with your DocVerse account. Here you can see that I’ve created a presentation and added it to my DocVerse:

Presentation ready to be shared using DocVerse

There are a couple of options for sharing the document. The first is to enter the email addresses of other DocVerse users into the “People” box, which means that any changes your colleague makes will be synced with your document and vice versa. DocVerse has a built-in resolution system to deal with any potential conflicts.

The second option is to use the document’s DocVerse URL. The great thing about this option is that you can use it to share the document with anyone; they don’t need to have PowerPoint or DocVerse installed.

Here’s my presentation in a browser window:

My presentation in Chrome

Although they can’t edit the document directly, people viewing the presentation in a browser can add comments that are then synced back to the file on my computer. This kind of simple cross-platform sharing and collaboration will make DocVerse really useful. I can’t wait for it to roll out support for the rest of the Office suite, for while I love Google Apps, I still need to use Office (particularly Word) from time to time.

DocVerse is currently in private beta. If you’d like to try it out , we have 200 invitations to give away to WWD readers .

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Slideshare Integrates YouTube

Imran Ali — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:07:10 +0000

Around a month ago, we wrote about the integration of Slideshare within Microsoft’s Office, notably Powerpoint.

Rashmi Sinha, the CEO of Slideshare, cheekily announced the company’s ‘acquisition of YouTube’ – more specifically, the ability to integrate ‘Video Inside Slides.’

Available starting today, this feature will enable users to play YouTube clips inside Slideshare. This potentially brings rich media to regular slide decks; and is particularly useful for demos and screencasts of applications and web sites.

In true Slideshare fashion, the company has heralded the arrival of video…in slideware!

Some of the company’s suggestions for the use of video include:

video CVs and resumes
news videos
screencasts
soundbites for press releases

Adding a video is as simple as selecting the Edit and Insert YouTube video commands from Slideshare and then choosing between which slides the clip is to be inserted. Simple!

The company states that this brings together the largest presentation archive and the largest consumer video archive, which opens some fascinating possibilities and potentially some great mashups and enhanced creativity for boring corporate material.

Coupled with the recent Powerpoint integration, this new partnership with YouTube might indicate there’s a broader ‘Slideshare-inside’ program in the offing. This means new value without jeopardizing years of experience invested in existing tools. Both developments around Slideshare suggest that the service deserves a richer API than is currently available, to enable the support of more diverse extensions and enable the development of commercial extensions in a Slideshare ‘ecosphere.’

SlideShare Brings The Cloud to Desktop MS PowerPoint

Jim Courtney — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:00:27 +0000

For many years users had to be satisfied with using either a computer screen or data projector to display Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. A few years ago making a PDF file for a slide presentation become an Adobe Acrobat option. For Power Point 2007, Adobe developed a PowerPoint ribbon bar to simplify the process. But all these output modes were tied to the local PC desktop environment, not only for the application but also the output.

Bloggers and web marketing personnel have been looking for ways to host PowerPoint slide presentations in “the Cloud” and embed them within weblog posts. SlideShare’s service had become one of the most popular of these services due to its relative ease-of-use. However, my first experience last spring found me switching between my PowerPoint desktop application to review and edit a third party’s PowerPoint presentation, and my browser to set up a SlideShare account through which I could upload the resulting presentation for embedding into a post.

Two days ago I had to upload another Power Point presentation to a weblog host. It just so happens I came across a press release from SlideShare along with an invitation to try out their new SlideShare Ribbon Bar for PowerPoint. So I gave it a workout.

As a result I was able to not only review and edit the slide show within PowerPoint but also perform the upload, tagging and title/description write-up with no need to use a web browser. Basically, SlideShare is one of the first services to embed web hosting access so deeply within an Office application.

This ribbon bar provides the ability to completely manage your SlideShare account from within PowerPoint. While I was able to install and use it successfully, it currently does require that the user manually do a .NET 3.5 SP1 upgrade (not yet performed via Windows/Office Update) that took close to an hour to complete over a broadband connection. Installing the ribbon bar itself went exactly as in the instructions stated and only took a few minutes.

The login to your SlideShare account is persistent, making it readily accessible anytime you launch PowerPoint 2007. You can bring back previously hosted slideshows for editing and re-uploading. One final comment: while I’m sure they will be addressed, I found a few minor bugs but they did not prevent me from accomplishing my main goal of making a PowerPoint presentation available for use within a weblog post.

SlideShare Ribbon Bar for PowerPoint could turn into a significant productivity tool for weblog authors and anyone involved in web-based sales, marketing and support activities.

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Clearing The Cache

Scott Blitstein — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:00:33 +0000

Like many of us, I spend quite a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.

Geek In Disguise passes on a tip about a cool product to help Keep Cables Tidy

BatchBlue designer Adam Darowski shares his Favorite CSS Techniques

Windows Live Sky Drive bumps storage to 25GB

Office Online shows us How to write a PowerPoint presentation in five minutes

Voice Search comes to Google Mobile App for iPhone

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Create and Share Flash Based Content With Flypaper

Scott Blitstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:18:57 +0000

Using Flash based content for your sales, marketing or training can be an effective and impressive way to present your message. It can also be expensive. When the content you created last month needs tweaking, it’s back to the developer to program your changes.

Flypaper wants to change that by providing tools that allow the general business user the ability to create and share rich content without the need for programming.

Flypaper is a Windows based application that makes creating Flash Content possible without the typical time and expense of hiring a developer.

Using just about any media content, you can create Flypaper Stories that aren’t just presentational, they can even be interactive and gather form data from your viewer.

Some examples on their site include everything from interactive sales presentations and brochures to portfolios and even fun things like a collection of Top 10 Monty Python Sketches.

Where Flypaper really pays off is that it is super easy to edit and reuse your stories. Make changes and revisions quickly so you can customize your content for a particular event or audience.

The creation process is very visual, sort of a cross between creating PowerPoint or Keynote slides and video editing. There is no code and no programming, but I would describe it as being very object oriented.

Everything that you create or add to a story has properties that define its appearance and behavior. If you create a page, you set the properties of that page. Add a button to the page and the interface changes to allow you to set the properties of that button. It is a very logical building block sort of approach and it works very well.

Creating branches in your stories to allow for user choice is really simple and a Story Map shows you how your pages fit together.

The Flybrary tool allows you to not only create libraries of your photos and other assets but it contains a bunch of sample templates and components that you can use in your own stories. It is also web enabled so you can search Flickr and other photo sites directly from Flypaper and drag and drop the content right in. (Be sure to check usage licenses on photos and other items found on the web)

When your story is created you can post it on the Flypaper.net or your own personal hosting site, or export to various formats including movies, executables or even SCORM e-learning courses. The Dashboard lets you view statistics on your stories, know what was viewed down to the page level.

I found Flypaper to be relatively easy to use, and the drag and drop functionality sure makes the process pretty simple. It will still take some time to create a fully featured professional looking presentation though. And there is still no shortcut for writing good copy and preparing compelling content.

Flyaper is a Windows only app but it should run well in Parallels or similar on the Mac.

A 30-day trial is available, after which the app and access to your flypaper.net account will normally run you $249, although there is special offer in place now for $195.

Would Flypaper make it easier for you to use Flash Content in your marketing?

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SlideRocket Opens For Business

Scott Blitstein — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:00:46 +0000

Online presentation software provider SlideRocket drops its beta tag today and officially opens up for business. We’ve written enthusiastically about SlideRocket in the past and continue to be impressed by not only their service offering but the quality of the content produced with it.

SlideRocket has always offered a a feature rich authoring tool with all of the bells and whistles you would expect, if not more. With today’s release they up the ante by adding powerful collaboration features and an integrated marketplace.

Collaboration:

Even in a small organization, preparing a slide deck is usually a collaborative process, or at the very least involves the sharing of frequently used assets. SlideRocket’s new collaboration functionality gives you all the tools you need to collect and share your content including library management, content synchronization, and version control.

The library lets you collect frequently used items and assign permissions across your group as to who has access to what items.

Powerful versioning functionality keeps track of changes and lets you revert back to prior copies at the slide and presentation level.

The SlideRocket Marketplace:

Also launched today is the integrated marketplace, a store within SlideRocket which allows you to browse and buy presentation related assets and services such as images, templates, printing and more. Initial partners include Fotolia, Mimeo and PresentationPro with many more planned.

One of the most intriguing features is the built in analytic tools. See who is viewing your decks, how long they spent on each slide as well as tracking clicks and forwards. Rather than sending your presentations out blind, you can now track their effectiveness.

SlideRocket runs in any browser across multiple operating systems, in addition to offering an offline player so you can present on the go without an internet connection.

SlideRocket is offering limited time discounts on their pricing plans from free limited functionality single user accounts up to fully featured Business plans from $20/user per month. Pre-paid annual subscriptions are eligible for further discounts.

Are you still using PowerPoint or Keynote? Could SlideRocket be an option for you?

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SlideRocket Enters Public Beta

Scott Blitstein — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:40:03 +0000

SlideRocket, the online presentation designer and manager we raved about back in March has flipped opened their doors and entered an open public beta phase.

SlideRocket offers an extremely impressive set of tools for creating and distributing presentations, and as they move into this next phase they have also added some really nice collaboration functionality that lets you share presentations, slides and specific assets with others in your organization.

Take the online tour and then grab your free beta account – if you’re looking to make an impression with your next presentation, SlideRocket won’t disappoint.

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