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	Convoq ASAP

PowerPoint Presentation Facilities

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Convoq ASAP sports one of the best and most interesting PowerPoint presentation toolsets available among best and most cost-effective Web conferencing and real-time collaboration systems.

ASAP integrates a powerful PowerPoint to Flash converter in its installation toolkit. This excellent software is installed inside your Microsoft PowerPoint application adding a mini toolbar to it. With it, it is easy to convert a PowerPoint presentation into Flash format before uploading to the Convoq ASAP presentation area. The advantages of this are manifold:

a) Quality of the slides is very good.

b) Slides can now be resized to fit any monitor size or screen resolution without any loss of quality. In fact presentations can now be run in full screen both at the presenter and at the participants ends without any problem.

c) File size is very small, making uploads, transfers to other systems and overall portability shine.

d) Transitions, animations and effects are all preserved in the final Flash file.

e) Everyone can see the presentation without needing to have PowerPoint installed on the participants' end (like some other real-time applications do). All that is needed is a Web browser with Macromedia Flash plug-in.

f) Presentation attendees can be on any type of computer including Macs, Linux boxes, Sun workstation and obviously standard Windows PCs.

g) ASAP fully supports audio and video embedded inside presentations and allows the effective conversion and delivery of such media-rich presentation files.

Further to these positive aspects the Convoq ASAP PowerPoint presentation facilities are very simple and intuitive to use. Once a presentation has been uploaded it is extremely easy to move forward and backward through the presentation or to suddenly jump to the first or last slide available.

Additional controls allow the presenter and the attendees to easily switch to full screen, or to set the presentaton display in 1:1 ratio with the original format or to "fit" within whatever available screen real estate. A "Hide" button also allows to easily turn off the presentation area at any moment.

Both presenter and attendees (if desired) can annotate live any of the slides being presented with a simple set of live mark-up tools integrating an highlighter, a very effective shared pointer, a text tool and an eraser.

To further facilitate presentation delivery, ASAP displays a Presenter Controls menu on the presenter Meeting Console. This menu includes the following items:

Remove from Meeting
Disconnects the selected participant from the meeting.

Hand-Raising
Lowers the hands of either the currently selected participants or all participants.

Annotations
Turns annotations on (if off) or off (if on) or clears all annotations from the current Workspace window.

Mute
Disables or re-enables audio broadcasting for either currently selected participants or all participants.

Enable/Disable
Allows or disallows use of the listed features during the current meeting.

On the cons side, these the few items to report:

a) Upon "starting a presentation" in an ASAP meeting, the system insists in loading up MSIE though this is not the default browser on my PC. To be corrected.

b) Limited live annotation toolset.

c) Can't preview slides or jump to a specific one.

d) Can't distribute slides or have users save individual ones locally.

e) I personally find it annoying to have to reload a presentation each time I have a meeting. This operation breaks the smooth integration and seamless continuity created everywhere else by ASAP. Having to go to PowerPoint to save my file in a new format, having then to come back to ASAP and having to upload it makes this operation a significant roadblock in an otherwise very comfortable and well integrated collaborative working environment.

f) Microsoft PowerPoint must be pre-installed on your PC if you want to deliver live presentations with ASAP.

Notes for properly embedding audio and video in your PowerPoint presentations:

To achieve the best results when converting a PowerPoint presentations that include audio and/or video, you are strongly invited to follow these guidelines:

a) Update your computer to include version 9.0 or later of Windows Media Player.

b) After installing version 9.x, start Windows Media Player.

c) Select Tools > Options and (on the Player tab), make sure that Download codecs automatically is selected.

d) Click on OK.

Note that conversion of PowerPoint files is affected by memory use of other applications running on your computer. If you encounter difficulties while converting a file, try closing some or all of the large applications running on your computer (for example, Outlook, Word) while you are converting.

General
The presentation cannot be larger than 5 MB.

Set the included movie to start automatically.

Video
The video format should be MPEG (.MPG; produced by any source) or WMV (produced by the Windows Movie Maker).

If the video is stored as AVI files, open them with Windows Movie Maker and convert them to WMV format.

Audio
The audio format should be MP3 (from any source) or WAV (created with Windows Sound Recorder)

To convert MP3 files from Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, use a tool such as Advanced WMA Workshop (available from www.LitexMedia.com).

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Posted on March 31, 2004 at 08:58 AM

Updated on April 14, 2004 at 11:21 AM

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