In my role, I have to talk to clients almost everyday and give them a presentation about our Portals and CM expertise. A major part of that is Case Studies. Because of the nature of things here, the format of powerpoint slides for case studies changes very frequently even though the content of a case study remains more or less similar – Challenges, How we did it, Business benefits etc.
I’ve been wondering if I could use some sort of a CMS and input all these things as text and then depending on Client or context, just generate a different PPT.
The good and ever helpful folks at cms-forum gave me some good pointers. Although I cannot use Powerpoint but their are really good alternatives such as:
- S5 by Eric Meyer – http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
- John Cox’s implementation at
http://www.wyome.com/index.php?module=articles&func=view&ptid=11&theme=slideshow_manta - http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/Open/PloneS5
- http://www.visiomode.com/slideshow/
- http://www.feedstream.com/XML2Flash/Demo1/Presentation.htm
- http://www.reportlab.org/python_point.html
(2), (3) and (4) above are basically implementations of Eric’s S5. I like the idea and have been playing around with them. My main problem is that I donot know PHP and Python. So i am planning to borrow this idea and integrate it with OpenCMS or some other java based system. The idea is simple – Generate an html (or JSP) file and apply S5 templates over that.
http://www.SlideManager.biz has an alternative and very elegant solution for this. It does not break things down per se but it does mananage sub slide objects to assure dynamic reformatting plus has a very innovative method of organizing slides into re-usable story modules…it will solve your problem.
The site does not have any links to buy or download this product. Do you know if they sell it?
The SlideManager sales contact is Greg Schwarzer, 303.818.9035, greg@3valuelogic.com.
I believe Heartbeat Software are the leaders in this field:
http://www.heartbeatsoftware.com/products/heartbeatpresenter