Business

On the Meeting: Teleconferencing, Videoconferencing and Web conferencing

Sure, once mostly a face-to-face practice, now executives are increasingly offering their wisdom via teleconference. It’s really more efficient than old ways to facilitate with modern technologies. Certainly teleconferencing is just the live exchange of voice on the meeting, and the videoconferencing has been used widely in last decade. Then now, conducting a live meetings or presentations via the Internet could be easier for anyone. Web conference, or Webniar can be seen everywhere over the Internet.

Right, I’m a techie fan, and here I’d like to review these current technologies for teleconferencing, videoconferencing and Web conferencing.

1. Internet Teleconference, such as Skype
Internet telephony involves conducting a teleconference over the Internet or a Wide Area Network. One key technology in this area is Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). A lot of commercial VoIP networks available over the world, and Skype is the most popular one for personal and SME uses. Actually Skype offers a series of solution for business to start off such tele-conferencing soon.

One thing left, video conferencing is supported on Skype. And it’s usually my first place alternative for international calls.

2. Videoconference Impact on Education, Medicine and Business
No doubt videoconferencing could be sort of essentials on distance education, and also helps most doctors diagnose any complicated illness. And especially on business, it enables individuals in faraway places to have meetings on short notice. Time and money that used to be spent in traveling can be used to have short meetings. The technology is also used for telecommuting, in which employees work from home.

I ever tried such video conferencing on e-learning, and it works well. And it’s also widely used for any international conference on UN, or most multi-national enterprises.

3. The Boom of Web Conferencing Services
Web conferencing is not just the Internet version of teleconferencing or video conferencing, there’re some other typical advanced features here: slide show presentations, live or streaming video, VoIP, Web tours, meeting recording, whiteboard, text chat, polls and surveys, and screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing.

A lot of IT vendors provide Web conferencing service, including Adobe, IBM and Microsoft. But I still prefer another two services: Cisco’s WebEx (http://www.webex.com/) and Citrix’s GoToMeeting (http://www.gotomeeting.com/).

We really have more and more meetings to go, and technologies just make them cost-efficient with our brilliant ideas.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Project Presentation Essential: Create Project Report Effortlessly in Office 2003

“As a Project Team Leader, how much time have you lost trying to take information from Microsoft Project and drop into to PowerPoint presentation? If you are like me, you’ve probably done a few ‘Print Screen’ and Pastes…”

I’m not a skilled Microsoft Project user, but I suddenly found this old add-in for Project 2003 terribly useful here. Basically, the installation drops a new toolbar within Project with a button labeled “Create Report Presentation…” and it allows you to select which milestones to show as well as which fields to include. Magically, now you get an auto-generated PowerPoint presentation with a slide dedicated to the project tasks. Maybe it’s a little out to use Office 2003, but I can’t find such good add-in with Office 2007. Whatever, it’s not bad trying this for just project leaders.

The Project Report Presentation Add-in for Microsoft Office Project 2003 helps a user to quickly and easily create a Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation containing user-selected task information from Microsoft Office Project.

Download Office 2003 Add-in: Project Report Presentation Here > >

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Ideas about Showing PowerPoint Presentations on iPhone

These days I was totally hooked with Apple iPhone from a friend. Certainly it’s not that fancy touch screen abuse, but those more and more interesting iPhone Applications from various innovative developers. Then I became wondering, how could I make my PowerPoint presentations displayed on iPhone, since it doesn’t like Windows Mobile to install such applications. After a little research, I got these ideas as below:

1. Export as a Series of Pictures to iPhoto on Mac
As Microsoft announced Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac last year, getting presentations from Mac to iPhone is relatively easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPhone to show your presentation.

It’s really easy to go and try this way. However, the presentation on iPhone becomes kinda picture slideshow, not with all animations along.

2. Convert as Supported MPEG-4 Video Formats
Since iPhone support MPEG-4 video in .mp4, .m4v, .mov formats, some software vendor offers the idea of presentation to video conversion. You can just convert your PowerPoint presentations to MPEG-4 video first, then import or sync the video to iPhone with iTunes.

This method sounds reasonable, and all animations are here. But please see, video presentation is not slideshow anymore, because you can’t control them easily slide by slide. Right?

3. Remote Control PowerPoint from Computers
So some iPhone application developers find this way to connect PowerPoint with computer via Wi-Fi network. Then you can remote control your PowerPoint presentations wirelessly from your iPhone, with a realtime view of your slides. Show your slides on your PC and use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clicker.

I haven’t tried this app yet, but the idea seems not bad. If everything goes fine in presentation, that’s the best way so far, if you have a reliable Wi-Fi connection on your iPhone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Online Holiday Boom with Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Because of the weak economy, consumers seem to prefer more online shopping with discounts or free shipping on this holiday season. At least, this is good news for most long-waiting online retailers. Based upon sorta great prospect, Abhay Parekh, founder & CEO of an interactive multimedia platform company, is presenting a wiselike guidance for business communicators, on Sales & Marketing Management Magazine:

Five Tips for Creating a Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Looking to create that perfect eye-catching sales presentation to lock in some last-minute Q4 sales? The you had better rethink your strategy and take your presentation to the virtual scale.

1. Show, rather than tell.
2. Ditch your static slide presentations.
3. Go virtual.
4. Survey says?
5. Know when to stop.

Read full article at:
http://www.presentations.com/msg/content_display/presentations/e3i54e0d1d9416e8c7fbf73d212d777bd11

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

IBM White Paper: The Value of Training and the High Cost of Doing Nothing

Never doubt that IBM’s training is the best business training I’ve ever seen. Recently, IBM published an interesting white paper called “The Value of Training” by consultant David Leaser. It notes that, a company will lose 10 to 30% of its capabilities per year. By year three, an organization has retained only 41% of it original capabilities, dwindling to 24% by year six. Right, that’s the point: it costs more than a better training, if we still do nothing.

When most companies are facing the terrible financial crisis, they cut the budget. Less business trip, less internal expenses, but significantly the staff training should not be ignored.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Office’s Running Hour: Sketching Out Your PowerPoint Presentations in Ten Minutes

Well, every Friday I’ll attend some weekly meetings in the company. I think most office people get the same as me. Have you ever found yourself decompressing in true leisure one minute and scrambling to meet any deadline the next? So I teach people to survive with making conference presentations effortlessly.

VideoJug’s “How to Write A PowerPoint Presentation In 5 Minutes” is a great tutorial for most staffs. However, there’s kinda funny elements in it. And I think an real enough briefing-like PowerPoint presentation could be made perfectly in 10 minutes. Besides these tips in that video, I have something else to recommend:

1. To make excellent presentation with professional-looking slides, you need some good PowerPoint template resources on your pocket. See one of my previous post about this here.

2. Getting used to these intuitive features in PowerPoint 2007 will make your creation better and faster. Just learn something like SmartArt, shortcuts, etc. Quick Tips for PowerPoint 2007 on my previous post | PowerPoint 2007 - Get up to speed from Microsoft

3. Attach more. When you’re too busy to summary something in the slides, why not just attach and show the original files within your presentation? Check out some previous posts from me about “attaching documents or objects“, “recording narrations“, “Adding YouTube video clips“, or “embedding real-time Web pages“.

Assuming you’ve got the 10-minute-presentation talent, you got enough breathing space in office, aren’t you?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

When Apple’s iPhone Becomes Rich: The Road to Flash or Silverlight on iPhone

Yesterday I read Brian Chen’s “Why Apple Won’t Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone“, and found that the “Flash on iPhone” topic is really everyone’s talking-about in the town. And most users would be disappointed with clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement.

“An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise … No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

I guess everyone is thinking, it’s not a jeopardous thing to allow Flash on iPhone platform, and Apple might be too arrogant. However, we have to wait Apple’s agreement - it would be in 9 months I think. Besides, we don’t refuse any tricks, such as the belgian interactive designer Thomas Joos made his tricks to port Flash Lite to the iPhone (http://vilebody.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/porting-flash-lite-to-the-iphone-btween/),

Other Riches: Can Microsoft Silverlight Catch It At First?

Jobs says Flash just doesn’t cut the mustard and won’t show up on the iPhone. Does that mean we can expect Silverlight running on the iPhone first? The 2.0 version of Silverlight features enhanced video support, and initial mobile support for Nokia S60 or Windows Mobile (http://silverlight.net/learn/mobile.aspx). According to Scott Guthrie, VP of Microsoft’s .Net developer division, the company has been working on Silverlight for the iPhone. But, like with Flash, Apple is reluctant to allow third-party Web plug-ins on its handset. If I’m Microsoft, I’ll try my best to persuade Apple, to capture the leading role in the mobile rich market.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

The Way We Use: Google Docs in Office and Classroom

Honestly I’m not promoting Google Docs for Google as an affiliate, the “Google Docs” in this article could be any kinds of online office applications, such as Zoho, ThinkFree, etc. Google Docs is just the might-be popular one as I know. And here I’m expressing my personal experiences about that.

Google Docs Make Office More Productive

I usually open those attached Word or Excel documents in my Gmail with Google Docs. That’s the best convenient and safe method I think to review these documents at the first impression. And then recently, more and more co-workers of mine like to share some documents via Google Docs to complete them with collaboration. It’s really save time and energy to do so. And the best part is, we can resume the work anytime anywhere if we get Internet to access Google Docs.

Google Docs Makes Classroom More Interesting

As not a teacher, I’m not sure more uses of Google Docs in classroom, but some teachers ever told me the Google Docs way to enrich the class is so friendly and it can be accepted by more students easily than the ways with LMS (Learning Management System). Certainly Google Docs cannot replace LMS, but for most documents, presentations sharing, it’s easy to get a class closer. There’s an good example presentation by Tom Barrett:

Eleven Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn2vcv5_8323t58h3ft

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Live, Not Survive: Microsoft Will Take Online Office on the Best Road

According to Anita Hamilton’s “Late to the Game: Microsoft Office Online” on TIME, the rivalry of paperless office technologies like word processor, spreadsheets or presentations, etc. has been not the old style ”Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus” for more and more companies. Giving Google Docs or Zoho a try is the recent popular choice for us.

Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant in the area of business applications for office, it can’t ignore what’s going in the current markets. It has been quite a few months after I introduced Microsoft’s project “Office Live Workspace Beta” (refer to Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road), and I cited that we really need better Web capabilities on the coming office suite (refer to On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web). But why Microsoft decide not catch up the way until 2010?

Microsoft Wants to Make the Best Web Office

I have to thank for all the efforts on those gorgeous ribbons and SmartArts in Office 2007, which really help me a lot on presentations. However, online compatibility is the biggest weakness in the Internet times. The coming Office 14 would be really late for the online office market, but I guess Microsoft won’t make that launch another miss. Heard from Workspace Team Blog, the Sliverlight technology has been added into the new Office Live Workspace. Based on the great rich media technologies from Microsoft Silverlight, maybe the expected Office 14 could move all rich features in Office 2007 to the Web. Isn’t that the best idea to conquer the online land for Microsoft? We’re waiting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Adobe Flash on iPhone/iPod Touch, Another Advancement for Mobile Business

Since Adobe Flash Lite in Windows Mobile platform smartphone is greatly common, and a lot of people benefit from mobile Flash applications with interactive rich media such as Mobile Learning, why the popular Apple iPhone still can’t support kinda Flash plugin for Safari or standalone Flash container for the hottest Flash streaming such as YouTube?

Yesterday Adobe at Flash on the Beach 08 Conference (FOTB) said the company is actively developing a port of its Flash animation plugin for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but Apple’s mobile operation system is a “closed platform” and so is out of Adobe’s control. Adobe indicated that it will not use Flash Lite but a better approach to faster iPhone processor and graphics chip.

Apple definitely will approve the great deal I think. And finally we get what we expect of familiar Flash-based interactive applications on mobile devices as exact two-win. I promise, the enhancement of Flash will extended iPhone as the mobile business center. Certainly Adobe Flash for iPhone/iPod Touch will optimize the experiences on Web.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran