A question from Tom Price:
What is the best way to deliver a PowerPoint presentation via the Internet to at least two to three different people at different locations?
I want to control the PowerPoint so that they can only see the pages that I want them to when I am ready. I do not need the voice ability as I will be speaking with them on the phone. Appreciate your help.
Dear Tom,
thank you for your kind question, which while it may appear a typical and easy one to answer, is indeed a very critical and difficult one to respond to.
There are indeed several solutions to this issue, and each one offers certain advantages while compromising on other aspects. Hardly anyone will always tell you about the real pros and cosn of each one of these.
1) You can utilize a service like Glance, which for USD $ 39.95/month, allows you to show your screen to anyone you elect to. The tool requires no downloading on the part of the participants and they need only to have a browser to see. Happily, if you have to jump to another slide or hide something on your desktop before showing the next one, an easy control feature, called "Hide Screen" allows you to momentarily suspend the vision to participants. (A free 1-day trial is available).
Cons: If your presentation contains a lot of photos this will not be the best way to display them on your screen participants. In Glance images are reduced to 8-bit (256 colors) images to speed up the transfer of the the data to each participating computer.
2) You can utilize a tool like Groove which would provide highest quality and display of PowerPoint slides as the files get to be transparently distributed to all participants PCs before the show starts. In this case though you would have no way of hiding temporarily your slides. What you can do is operate in other sections of Groove or even in other applications without yor participants being able to see any of that. Groove Standard edition costs USD $ 69. (A free 90-day fully functioning preview edition is available).
Cons: Cannot really preview slides while running the show, though it would be possible to get around the problem by running a copy of the presentation in PowerPoint itself in a separate session. This would allow the participants in your Groove presentation to not see what you preview in other applications during the show. Groove is a very resource intensive application and requires downoad and installation on recent PCs.
3) You can utilize the approach I have suggested in my article about TypePad and use this online service to upload all of your slides. In this approach you first convert your Powerpoint slides to jpeg or gif images and then you upload them to an online service that manages photo albums. Once this is done, showing the slides through a simple SOHO Web conferencing tool like VoiceCafe, Orbitalk, Voxwire or RoomTalk would allow you to preview the slides without your participants being able to see what you are doing. The combined services would cost you less than $30-35/month and TypePad offers a free 30-day trial.
Cons: Display of slides may not be optimized to fill the screen completely and transitions and custom animations are all lost (not so with the above two solutions). Longer preparation process to convert the PPT presentation and then to upload all slides to TypePad.
4) More sophisticated Web conferencing and live presentation tools like Microsoft Live Meeting or Webex also allow the presenter to preview and review the slides to be presented before they are publicly shown. While the facilities these systems employ is very sophisticated and effective, the costs required to use these systems rae generally intended for corporate/enterprise users and it starts at 35 cents/per user/per minute without audio.
Cons: Essentially the cost.
I am sure that there would even be other effective approaches that I have not considered in this short reply to you. Nonetheless I hope that you can find in one of the above an immediate solution to your problem.
Tom, for more information about all of the most cost-effective, usable, and reliable live presentation tools available today, I suggest my most recent edition of the SOHO Guide to Web Conferencing which offers my personal review of each tool with in-depth info about each feature and facility each tool provides.
Robin Good
