Articulate Presenter does all presentations

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Now that everyone is online, the opportunity to deliver knowledge and training using the Web is becoming not just a good idea but also an essential tool for education, pre-sales, and technical training.

Now what do most business professionals know how to create? That's right, PowerPoint presentations. And what do 98% of browser users have installed? Right again, Macromedia's Flash player. You guessed it; today I have a tool for converting PowerPoint into Flash-based presentations. But that's not all it can do.

Published by Articulate Global http://www.articulate.com/, Articulate Presenter http://www.articulate.com/presenter.html is a plug-in for PowerPoint that allows you to add to your training material a synchronized voice track, multi-level navigation, attachments and links, Flash movies, Web objects (resources retrieved from a URL), and a video of the presenter. You can also use more than 165 of the animations supported by PowerPoint. See http://www.articulate.com/presenter_features.html for the full range of features.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Now that everyone is online, the opportunity to deliver knowledge and training using the Web is becoming not just a good idea but also an essential tool for education, pre-sales, and technical training.

Now what do most business professionals know how to create? That's right, PowerPoint presentations. And what do 98% of browser users have installed? Right again, Macromedia's Flash player. You guessed it; today I have a tool for converting PowerPoint into Flash-based presentations. But that's not all it can do.

Published by Articulate Global http://www.articulate.com/, Articulate Presenter http://www.articulate.com/presenter.html is a plug-in for PowerPoint that allows you to add to your training material a synchronized voice track, multi-level navigation, attachments and links, Flash movies, Web objects (resources retrieved from a URL), and a video of the presenter. You can also use more than 165 of the animations supported by PowerPoint. See http://www.articulate.com/presenter_features.html for the full range of features.

Multi-lingual support is also included. Articulate has a very good presentation of Presenter's features - see the "Take the Screenshot Tour" link on http://www.articulate.com/presenter.html.

When you are ready to publish a presentation, you can control the output quality and compression and save it for the Web as a Flash presentation. You can also save it for use on learning management systems (LMS) that are compliant with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) http://blog.articulate.com/wom/2004/06/29/scorm/index.php or AICC http://www.aicc.org/pages/cert.htm, which includes Articulate's own Articulate Server http://www.articulate.com/server.html.

Additionally, Articulate Presenter can output to CDs; Articulate's own hosting service, the Articulate Knowledge Portal [http://www.articulate.com/knowledge_portal.html]; as a storyboard document for Microsoft Word; and as a set of Presenter project files for team-based content development.
 
The Flash player is feature rich and nicely designed with customizable layout templates, color schemes (with a color scheme editor), configurable navigation tabs, slide titles tool-tips and wrapping, customizable buttons and messages, and presentation launching options (such as size, browser configuration, etc.) Click on the screenshot at the end of http://www.articulate.com/presenter.html. There's even a developer's SDK.

This is an enormous set of tools that covers a huge range of training needs from simple presentations right through to full-blown e-learning. The system requirements are straightforward and you can see a full list of the requirements here: http://www.articulate.com/presenter_system_requirements.html.

There are two versions of Articulate Presenter: Standard and Pro. The Standard version doesn't include presenter video, the timeline audio editor, the color scheme editor, the ability to publish to LMSs, integration with Ariticulate's Quizmaker http://www.articulate.com/quizmaker.html and the creation of Flash-based learning games. You can check out a comparison of Standard vs. Pro here: http://www.articulate.com/presenter_comparison.html.

Articulate Presenter Pro is $700 and Articulate Presenter Standard is $500. Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio, which includes the Pro version along with Articulate Quizmaker ($400) and Rapid E-Learning PowerPoint Template Kit ($150), is priced at $1,000. Hosting with the Articulate Knowledge portal starts at $995 per month for 100-user accounts and running the portal software on your own servers starts at $18,000.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.