Webinar Wire

Features: Slides

Posted by Ken Molay December 10 2007 8:58 AM EDT

Part two of a series... Collect them all!

Today we turn our attention to the ways in which web conferencing products deal with the single most common use of webinar software: Displaying presentation slides to the audience.

The first thing to realize is that web conferencing vendors are singularly myopic on the issue of slideware. As far as they are concerned, slides come from Microsoft PowerPoint. I am not aware of any webinar product that advertises the specific ability to take slides from Apple Keynote or OpenOffice Impress, to name two other presentation slideware products. Therefore, I will refer to PowerPoint in this article for brevity when talking about the source content for displayed slides.

Each vendor takes its own approach to showing slides to the viewing audience. Here are the major classifications:

1) Convert the slides to Flash and show the Flash video. Adobe Connect is one vendor that uses this approach. Flash conversion gives the possibility for retaining animations and slide transitions in the converted version, although different conversion algorithms have different success rates. Adobe for instance is good at preserving most animations, but does not attempt to preserve transition effects (like a wipe from one slide to the next).

2) Convert the slides to a proprietary internal format. WebEx uses this approach, creating something called a UCF format. Again, the vendor's conversion algorithm determines what effects are retained in the converted form for display to the audience. WebEx has worked hard on its conversion routine and has a very high success rate with most slide decks.

3) Convert the slides to static images. Most (but not all) companies who take this approach use the export functionality built into PowerPoint to export a set of image files from the presentation, one for each slide. Companies may take different routes, choosing to save to JPG, GIF, or other image formats in varying levels of image quality (proportional to file size). Image files obviously discard animations and you have to be very careful to test the outcome on slides with animated builds, as you may be surprised by which elements show up on the exported image. Vendors may let you choose the image size at export time or they may export multiple image files at different sizes to let audience members choose a display size from a small set of options. Very few allow vector-based continuous resizing across a range of display sizes.

4) Convert the slides to HTML pages. This is usually analogous to export and display of image files, but a few vendors have attempted to add one or two effects that can be replicated in HTML, such as handling simple "appear" animations. Display on HTML pages may enable scaling of the image by audience members, although this is by no means guaranteed.

5) Share the content via application/desktop sharing. Citrix GoToWebinar is the best-known example of this approach. Citrix doesn't know anything about slides. It just shows whatever appears on your desktop. So if you run a PowerPoint slideshow on your desktop, that's what the audience sees... complete with all animations and slide transitions. Citrix is the only vendor I recommend for this approach, as their application sharing speed and performance is light years ahead of the competition. Everyone else has a good probability of showing a jumpy and jerky redisplay of content on audience computers, where smooth animation and effects are lost in the high bandwidth demands of a big graphics redraw.

6) Special mention goes to Live Conference Pro for an unorthodox approach. They keep PowerPoint presentations in the PowerPoint format and rely on audience members having the PowerPoint viewer software installed and available on their computers. Presentations retain all effects as originally crafted, since it is native PowerPoint all the way. The software also uses the HTML conversion mentioned in point 4 as a backup for viewers without the required software. They see static images in a browser window.

The philosophy taken by the vendor affects quite a few practical aspects of usage within a meeting session. Slides that are converted to files or meeting objects may allow you to keep them "stored" in the meeting room between sessions. This lets an organizer pre-load and test all the slides ahead of time and then start the meeting shortly before show time. Other vendors start each meeting session from a blank slate and require you to get your slides into that session.

Slides that are converted to meeting objects may enable pre-caching on audience members' computers, which can speed display of each slide to reduce latency between the time the presenter switches to a slide and the time the audience sees it. It can be frustrating for audience members to hear a presenter say "As you can see on this slide..." when they are still looking at the previous slide's content.

Most vendors support self-service upload/conversion of slides. A few (such as PresenterNet) require the organizer to submit the target slide deck to the company for conversion and upload. If upload/conversion is self-service, you should verify whether you can add/replace a slide deck while a meeting is in progress or whether you have to do it ahead of time. One or two vendors (such as WebEx and Adobe Connect) let you have multiple slide decks active and available within a meeting, allowing you to swap between them. This can be useful for multiple presenters who use different slide templates.

I am unaware of any vendor who will let you swap out a single slide without reloading the entire presentation. This is a HIGHLY desirable feature and I'd love to see somebody introduce it... If you have to fix a quick typo you see at the last minute it can be impractical to spend the time to reconvert the full slide presentation.

Once the slides are available for viewing, careful review is in order. PowerPoint is a very complex format, with features that change from release to release, and web conferencing vendors are hard-pressed to stay up with the latest tricks. If you use graphic elements with fancy fills (such as photographic overlays, patterns, or color gradients), make sure they come out as you expected. A common problem is for vendors to reduce the color palette in the converted version, so a smooth gradient from one color to another displays as a series of discrete color bands. I have seen problems with object rotations not being preserved in the converted version. If your vendor retains animations, check them all against your original. Timed animations may change to click-driven starts and vice-versa. Movement animations are often not retained (where an object travels a path from one point to another one the screen).

A few vendors will let you retain active hyperlinks on slides so that your audience can click on a web link or an email address and open a browser window or email form. This is fairly unusual and a nice side benefit.

The last point of comparison I will mention is slide navigation. Implementation methods vary greatly between vendors. Some only allow the presenter to move forward or backward one slide at a time. Others display a drop-down menu that may display slide numbers or slide titles for direct access. Several vendors show a thumbnail view of slides, letting the presenter click on an image of the slide to select it for display. One or two vendors let the presenter review slides in a larger window before showing them to the audience (which can also be useful for secretly referring to a slide's content during a Q&A session without interrupting the audience's view).

The vendor can also choose whether to restrict slide navigation to the "active presenter" or allow all presenters to have simultaneous access to the controls. Restricting the controls helps to avoid the potential for people accidentally changing slides during another presenter's section. But simultaneous control removes an administrative step of "passing the baton" from one presenter to the next. Every time you introduce a mandatory operation, it introduces the potential for one more thing to go wrong! Which style you prefer is likely to be a matter of preference.

Remember, no matter how the software treats your slides, it can't improve a poorly designed presentation. Content is king, and that is entirely up to you.