PowerPoint Blog
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Damian McDonald is the founder of Visual Newmedia which has over 15 years’ experience in developing communication solutions for a number of leading global brands. Damian heads the team in the development and implementation methodologies of Visual’s presentation management solution - Visual Presenter.
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the problems being faced by folks who create and deliver presentations?
Damian: We’ve been developing presentations for corporate clients since the mid-nineties and have found that the issues businesses face in the area of presenting to their own clients have remained pretty consistent throughout that time.
Obviously the most-widely used presentation application is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is simple enough that most presenters can construct a basic piece of work within it. The problem lies in a more macro sense: in particular the management – and control – within the business of the various presentations that have been created.
From a business point of view, there tends to be no brand consistency across this multitude of presentations, both visually and within the content itself. This is an issue even for smaller organisations. With individuals ‘going it alone’ to create presentation collateral, the brand messages are mixed, confused, personalised and worse, often obsolete. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the end user -- another issue we find time and again is that those presenting cannot find the information within the company’s network drives to even update what they are going to present. This is especially true for those working remotely who, ironically, tend to be in the kinds of roles that have to deliver most of the company presentations, and so they simply create and recreate ‘individualised’ presentations, and the information being delivered becomes more and more off-brand, off-message, and out of date.
We also find that even if businesses want to keep their front line personnel updated with the latest information for client presentations, they often have no mechanism with which to do this. Or you’ll find they can get information to one business channel, but not others, so you still have a frighteningly inconsistent brand message being communicated to clients and prospective clients. So it becomes a vicious cycle, in a sense. These are all issues that we created Visual Presenter to address.
Something else we worked on while developing Visual Presenter was addressing the issues in PowerPoint when it comes to linking associated media files. Clients no longer accept sitting through ‘Death by PowerPoint’ bullet point after bullet point. People expect multimedia, and any effective presentation will include this.
Unfortunately, as multimedia technology has evolved with PowerPoint, media formats such as video, audio, and Flash struggle to maintain valid media links. For example, if you import a video over the network and then disconnect from the network, when it then comes to presenting, PowerPoint can’t play the video as it tries unsuccessfully to search for the file on the ‘non-existent’ network location. Very frustrating for the presenter, and very unprofessional.
And how do you merge interactive custom shows? Again we’ve frequently found that those presenters who do begin to get a bit smarter with the advanced functionality of PowerPoint are hampered by the fact that currently there is no way to merge interactive presentations without losing this functionality and having to recreate it. Again, very restrictive, and very frustrating.
The end result, invariably, is that presenters give up trying to create dynamic presentations, they find they can’t customise material to suit a particular audience, they can’t access new information and so they go out to the market with tired, inaccurate, unprofessional-looking material, despite the best of intentions. And the organisation suffers accordingly.
Geetesh: How does your Visual Presenter product help them in the problem scenarios you explained?
Damian: Working for such a long period of time in this area, and with a large range of businesses has enabled us to address all these problem scenarios effectively. We also continue to develop Visual Presenter to address issues that we anticipate could affect businesses in the future. At a one-on-one level, we work with the organisations to use this knowledge to address their specific needs. Thankfully not every business is affected by every problem we were talking about in the first question!
Specifically, where we help is addressing the needs at both ends of the problem, if you like: those of the business itself, and those presenting.
With Visual Presenter, users can create presentations in minutes that automatically tailor the content and design to their audience. Content that is relevant to a user is automatically updated from a centralised server. This is one of the key pieces of functionality of Visual Presenter: it operates as a Master Library of presentations: easy to access, easy to update, easy to control.
We’ve also designed Visual Presenter to allow users to create presentations remotely while flying or in between appointments without internet or network access. Everything they need to create presentations is cached locally.
From the viewpoint of the organisation, if messaging changes, or if there’s an entire brand ‘look and feel’ change out, it is simply a case of applying a new PowerPoint template to the library of presentations. Visual Presenter automatically reformats the required content to the correct design format. For larger organisations, or those that manage multiple brands, Visual Presenter also enables them to have information dynamically represented with different template designs across the library.
When any changes are published to the main library – and it’s a very simple process to make alterations to the content – online users are automatically notified that updates are available. Through a “one click” update process all required content for the user is updated to enable them to create presentations on or off the network.
We did a lot of work around the media file issue, and the effectiveness of our solution is that it automatically tracks media content supported by PowerPoint. If media is found that is not stored locally, Visual Presenter will automatically copy down the media and make sure it is tracked with the presentation, the key point being that this ensures that media always plays effectively during a presentation whether you are on or off the network.
A concern often raised with us is the inability companies have to tailor presentations to suit their audience. This is where Visual Presenter, as an Agenda Based Presentation Management Solution is streets ahead of Slide Management Solutions. When a presentation is created it automatically selects the appropriate information and structure for a given audience. This allows companies to better manage how information is communicated to different target audiences. Further to that, if a presenter wants to tweak the content while they present, Visual Presenter has a unique agenda-based interface that allows additional information to be made available while presenting, giving the presenter a new level of control.
And to complete the process, Visual Presenter makes it simple for companies to get accurate presentation feedback. They can define what they would like to report on, e.g. presentation results, content feedback, next action and date, market feedback etc. As with the other features of Visual Presenter, this works to ensure a company is delivering the best presentations possible to an ever-demanding market.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Archives:
April 2003 | May 2003 | December 2003 | January 2004 | February 2004 | March 2004 | April 2004 | May 2004 | June 2004 | July 2004 | August 2004 | September 2004 | October 2004 | November 2004 | December 2004 | January 2005 | February 2005 | March 2005 | April 2005 | May 2005 | June 2005 | July 2005 | August 2005 | September 2005 | October 2005 | November 2005 | December 2005 | January 2006 | February 2006 | March 2006 | April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 | July 2006 | August 2006 | September 2006 | October 2006 | November 2006 | December 2006 | January 2007 | February 2007 | March 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007 | August 2007 | September 2007 | October 2007 | November 2007 | December 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 | March 2008 | April 2008 | May 2008 | June 2008 | July 2008 | August 2008 | September 2008 | October 2008 | November 2008 | December 2008 | January 2009 | February 2009 | March 2009 | April 2009 | May 2009 | June 2009 | July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | October 2009 | November 2009 | December 2009 | January 2010 |
