Pushing Communicaton and Collaboration to a New Level: Create, Manage and Share Presentations on the Web

One of the many great perks of being a part of the Adobe Education Leadership (AEL) program is learning about new technologies, applications or services that are up and coming. Tech Wednesday (they are "Tech Thursday" for us in the Southern Hemisphere) are live Acrobat Connect presentations that Adobe hosts almost weekly. AELs and other Adobe user groups are invited to view/participate in the presentations. They are great and range from new product releases to 3rd party customers. I wasn't able to attend the presentation live this morning, but since the live presentation was recorded through Acrobat Connect, I was able to easily view it later by accessing a web link.

This morning Mitch Grasso - the co-founder of SlideRocket was the presenter. SlideRocket is an exciting new (you can sign up for a beta account on the website) web based application that has been designed using Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.

SlideRocket is pushing presentation desktop products like PowerPoint and KeyNote by allowing users to "design, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web." It has many of the features you have come to use in the desktop products plus more!!!

The cool thing about SlideRocket is that you (as the publisher of the presentation) can add users with different permissions and roles. Some of the other unique aspects of SlideRocket:

• use existing or create your own themes.
• you can pull data in from Google spreadsheets to create charts and tables.
• images can be uploaded to SlideRocket, pulled from your computer or in from Flickr.
• you can add Flash Videos (.flv) and Flash Movies (.swf) to your presentations.
• availability of a "plug-in architecture" that can be adapted and extended then shared with the SlideRocket Community.
• the folks from SlideRocket are presently working with SalesForce.com to create some very unique work flows for the SlideRocket community.

I would encourage you to sign up for a beta account and give SlideRocket a try. I think it will be a very exciting tool that will help to introduce a unique work flow not only for corporate but for the education community as well.