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SlideAware

Use SlideAware to easily collaborate on PowerPoint presentations in wiki pagesJuly 31 2007

The reason for the success of wikis is that they make it easy to publish, update and collaborate on content. With SlideAware embedding and review capabilities, it becomes easy to update and collaborate on PowerPoint presentations attached to wiki pages.

Embedding a presentation in your wiki

To allow wiki users to quickly browse presentations, you should use SlideAware embedding capabilities.

First upload your presentation to SlideAware. If you have the SlideAware add-in installed, just click on the Save to SlideAware button in PowerPoint, otherwise sign-in to your SlideAware personal account and click on the Upload button.

Then, click on Share Presentation in SlideAware and go to the Embed tab.

The auto-play option is useful when you want the presentation to look like a Flash banner; see our previous article for more details.

Choose manual play.

• Check the "show review" option to allow users to attach notes directly on the slides
• Check the "show share" option if you want users to be able to embed the presentation in other wikis or blogs
• Check the "show download" option to allow users to download

Create a Flash banner for your blog using PowerPoint and SlideAwareJuly 30 2007

Let’s say you want to put a Flash banner on your blog or website but you don’t have the time or know-how to actually build a Flash banner.

 

First, build your banner in PowerPoint:

• If you don't want the banner to have a 4/3 width/height ratio, just change the slide dimensions (in PowerPoint, go to the File menu and choose Page Setup)
• If you want a frame of the banner to be built in stages, just use custom animations (in PowerPoint, go to the Slide Show menu and choose Custom Animation)
• If you want people to navigate to another pages when clicking on a shape in the banner, just add and hyper link to the shape (in PowerPoint, right-click on the shape, and choose Hyperlink...)

 

Then, upload the presentation to SlideAware. If you have the SlideAware add-in installed, just click on the Save to SlideAware button in PowerPoint, otherwise sign-in to your SlideAware personal account and click on the Upload button.

Unlike all other services out there that do PowerPoint to Flash conversion and hosting, we generate a SlideAware SlideShow (that’s how we call the generated Flash movie) that:

•  Respects the dimensions of your slides
•  Preserves the builds
• Turns hyper links into hotspots

Then, click on Share Presentation in SlideAware and go to the Embed tab.

 

Newsletter #2: browser upload & richer embeddingJuly 26 2007

Upload presentations from your internet browser
You no longer need to install the SlideAware PowerPoint add-in to start using SlideAware. Simply click on the "upload" button and follow the instructions in the pop-up to upload a PowerPoint file to SlideAware.

You should install the add-in if:

• you often save presentations to SlideAware; with the add-in, publishing to SlideAware is one click away
• you use SlideAware to collaborate on new presentations and you need to retrieve notes from co-workers back into PowerPoint
• you prefer to keep private documents private; the add-in allows you to store presentation content on an enterprise file store (the document then never goes outside your firewall)

Use browser upload if:

• your corporate policy does not allow you to install any 3rd party add-in
• you use PowerPoint 2007; just make sure to save your presentation as .PPT (PowerPoint 97-2007 format)
• you only use SlideAware for live presentations
• you only use SlideAware to produce Flash banners for your website or blog
• you only use SlideAware to embed presentations on a wiki; however if you are using a behind-the-firewall wiki, you will need the add-in to store the pres

Our first newsletter: tutorial, versioning, live review and notesJuly 7 2007

Video Tutorial
With our new tutorial, using SlideAware is as simple as watching a video! The tutorial will give you step-by-step instructions on setting up your account, sharing a presentation, collecting feedback, etc... You will get up and running in no time. Learn more


Versioning
Maintaining multiple versions of a document can be painful. Not only is it time consuming, but all these pres_v1.ppt, pres_v2.ppt, pres_v3.ppt files are starting to clutter your hard drive!

With the addition of versioning, SlideAware makes this completely transparent:

• Every time you save to SlideAware, a new version is created for you.
• The full audit trail is accessible in case you ever need it.
• And best of all, the links you sent (for review or for self-paced view) automatically point to the latest version, so no need to re-email anything!

There is a world outside of Ruby on RailsMay 11 2007

Here is a typical conversation we get pulled into: Why again did you chose Erlang for a Web2.0 app ? Surely, you must have heard of Rails ? Erlang is such an obscure language. What about database support, documentation, a vibrant community, a developing environment, debugger, migration tools, etc... these do make a big difference in the long run (and surely outweighs the fact that YAWS, the Erlang app server, might or might not be faster than Apache)

Well, these are all valid points, and this is precisely because Erlang is strong in all of these aspects that we ended up selecting it as our language of choice. Let's digg a little further if you will.

Erlang is an obscure language
However you look at it, functional languages (Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang) are less popular than your typical Ruby/Python/Java/C#. But who said the most popular language was the best ? (wouldn't we all be programming in VB if this was the case :-) Maybe it is possible that there exists some hidden gems out there and it might be worth the time investigating these obscure languages. Notice that Paul Graham faced the exact same questions when he decided to go with Lisp for his startup in 98 !

If you pay close attentio