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.

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