Slideaware - An intrusive online slideviewer Tuesday, May 08, 2007
I'm been a keen advocate of Slideshare since discovering it about 9 months ago. It's an incredibly easy way to share slide decks online and I've used it a number of times to publish presentations I've done such as Sex & the Investor, which has been viewed nearly 2,000 times.
My only gripes with it is that you can't password protect presentations to restrict who can view them, nor use it to run remote presentations, which is a great shame.
So, I was interested to see how SlideAware would measure up when I read that you could password protect your slides and run live remote presentations, all for free (premium service for $12pm).
However, the service fell at the first hurdle as far as I'm concerned - in order to upload presentations you need to install a toolbar within Powerpoint.
Now, there are several services I've happily done this for including Zoho's Office but they weren't mandatory, which meant I could try the service out first before deciding if I wanted to install a "permanent" feature inside my application.
It's a shame that a simple FTP upload facility isn't available which would have allowed you to go toe-dipping with the later option to install the toolbar once you learnt how great it was. I can't tell whether this is a technical restriction or a sales technique - they may think I will be a stickier user if I have the toolbar installed and that frivolous users will be deterred.
Guess I'll keep looking.
Labels: "Online apps", powerpoint, sharing, slides, slideshare
posted by John Wilson @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link
newsvine
reddit
2 Comments:
-
At 4:31 PM,
said...
-
Actually, when you sign up, you get a presentation preloaded into the system that you can use to try out various things like the live presentation stuff, and also more recently, the real time review stuff as well.
There are a couple of reasons for requiring a plugin.
1. As you guessed, the frivolous user issue (we see a lot of flash crowd type behavior based on blog posts that are not necessarily serious users - we dont want them to disrupt the quality of service for our serious user base). Note - Bloggers are never typical users, their job is to use something for 10 minutes, then opine about it.
2. The plugin adds a lot of value in term of the user experience. For example, in review, the notes from the review session can be directly brought back into powerpoint.
3. The third reason has to do with software as a service, and its potential to be used in an enterprise context -- I'll leave it at this for now, we will be announcing more about this in the next few weeks.
Regards,
Vijay
CEO, SlideAware -
At 9:26 AM,
Andrea Fellegara said...
-
I tried to use slideburner. It seems to me a very nice choice. Take look at this Post.
Thanks and Ciao AF http://silenzidalpe.blogspot.com
