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A couple of tools have come to my attention that may be useful if your
company has a few dollars to spend. These are more on the marcom side
than the techcom side, but you may have applications for them,
especially in training.
The first is Brainshark (www.brainshark.com, unsurprisingly). The
general idea is that you create a PowerPoint presentation and upload it
to their server, whereupon it is converted to compressed flat graphics.
Then you pick up the telephone, dial in, and record a narration for each
slide. There are all sorts of slick controls so you can reorder, delete,
rerecord, merge presentations, etc.; find out who views your
presentation; sort stuff into folders; and some other things.
We adopted this recently, and some of the benefits that are already
obvious include:
• Much tighter PowerPoint work among the hoi polloi. Because of the size
of the playback window, you really can't have small fonts and wordy
slides. You can't use PowerPoint animation effects at all, and you have
to concentrate on keeping the message simple, short, and focused. A lot
of PowerPoint abuse is effectively eliminated.
• Usefulness as a training medium. Because you can move slides around,
you can create a custom training presentation for different audiences.
This does not replace classroom training--or even live online training.
But if you are rolling out a software enhancement and really just need
to do a show and tell, this is a cheap way to do it. You know which
customers have viewed it and which individuals at each customer; you can
send it only to the customers who are using the module you're talking
about; and the voice narration makes it a richer medium than just
sending a PDF.
Because it is positioned as a sales and marketing tool, you might want
to approach the purchase decision by getting some S&M types hooked (read
that any way you want) and then just kinda weasel your department in on
their coattails. That might be the easiest way to get it approved.
The other product is Presentation Librarian
(www.accent-technologies.com). This is a content management system that
comes in various flavors, but we're looking at their ASP model (where
you pay per seat per month on their hosted system rather than buying the
system and installing it on your own server).
The idea is that you can organize presentations, PDFs, and Word
documents, attach metadata to them for searching and sorting, manage
versions and permissions, etc. We have not made the decision to get this
yet, and I'd be interested in feedback from anyone who has experience
with it or who rejected it in favor of something better.
I don't know how well it handles other file types. For the ones listed,
you get thumbnails at the page or slide level, making it easier to pick
the pieces you want to assemble. (For PowerPoints, by way of example,
you can select individual slides from multiple presentations, arrange
them in a sequence, and download an assembled composite
presentation--great for sales folks.) But I haven't dug into whether you
can upload, for instance, FrameMaker documents, HTML pages, etc.
I'm interested in this because we have a rather haphazard system now,
and the lack of metadata to assist in searches is becoming a burden.
Again, this sort of thing may or may not be appropriate in your
organization, so I'm just soliciting opinions from people who've brushed
up against this particular product.
Thanks,
Dick
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