Google Apps

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

Bad or Not: The Pre-Release Business Trick on Google’s Chrome Browser

Everyone is talking about Google’s Chrome yesterday and today. I waited, downloaded, and tried the nice gadget webkit, but I really don’t understand why Google make such business tricks from the browser itself to the pre-release comic. Whatever the Google webkit was bad or not in practice, I realized that the whole show was a definitely successful case as business presentation: the new model from industrial top player.

We can imagine that how many users read the comic book before the official release to know a little more about the veiled gadget. For business, the show has completely influence the future users. We usually think that presentation is built on the systemic introduction with words and images. Comic the way perfectly combines the words and images as presentation to pull the idea on the stage simply and effectively. I deeply appreciate Google’s efforts on providing such great product and creative launching.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

YouTube Video in Google Presentation, As Expected

Caught from Official Google Docs Blog last Friday, Google Presentation took Speaker notes and YouTube videos in.

As we expected the feature of YouTube videos in Google Presentation long long time ago, Google finally simplify the adding YouTube in Presentation way with its adopted YouTube. About the traditional methods to add YouTube Flash videos in PowerPoint presentation, please read my complete guide.

Videos can help you make a point, command the attention of your audience, or even add humor to your presentation. Now in presentations, you can insert one or more YouTube videos onto your slides and play the videos while you’re presenting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Criticize the Top Players of Web Presentation in Flash: authorSTREAM, SlideShare and Google

After authorSTREAM continuously sent the e-newsletter “PowerPoint on iPod and YouTube” to me and all others, I had a glimpse of its new campaign upon popular elements. It got me thinking about the current Web presentation services on Web 2.0. It might be easy to find that most palyers on the stage build their Web presentation system on Flash platform, and promote the idea as community like YouTube. Whatever how many sites follow the fad to provide Web presentation services, most of them don’t catch the real feeling of Web 2.0. Here I just express my initial thinking to the well-done Flash projects on the Web presentation stage. Anyway, feel free to think through some of your own in the comments.

. Google Docs by Google. Firstly, to be fair, Google always offers various Web freebies as most peoples preferred, so I cannot judge a Web search engine provider with any presentation related critics. But under its well-known brand and Web technologies, Google Docs could be really great alternative to Microsoft Office Suite, especially with its better documents compatibility recently. Meanwhile, the defects are obvious: animation effects, crashed scripts and limited features. For most exsiting Google users, the ability within one universal Google account is certainly easy to use.

. authorSTREAM by authorGEN. Before its athorSTREAM promoted to me, I have knew its producer authorGEN as its leading in multimedia presentation solution. The company of authorGEN has produced authorPOINT, which creates professional presentation for business and e-learning from PowerPoint. Upon the stable technology of PowerPoint presentations to online Flash shows, authorSTREAM made a rapid growth on the Web presentation stage. The promotion idea with popular elements blogs, iPod and YouTube included also sounds great. Actually its presentation technologies are really advanced, that is, the animated slids and embedded audio would be the fair point as so far.

. SlideShare by SlideShare. It launched the service early, and the community is generally popular upon the well-done construction and promotion these years. As the king of Web presentation service, its entire community system including slideshow sharing, rating and additional features does no wrose than how YouTube works. Moreover, its affiliation on Facebook as one integrated online application (http://apps.facebook.com/slideshare) leads better attractions. However, unfortunately it didn’t provide plentiful office features like Google Docs, or enhanced presentation abilities like authorSTREAM. But really like YouTube community, it cannot stop its popularity on the stage.

Well, that’s the quick review I came up with. Like most users, I’m not sure there’s a real toplist there, but it doesn’t mean I can’t make some nice opinions. By the way, you may have a look at Google’s presentation in Flash about Q1 2008 Quarterly Earnings Summary on SlideShare’s Slideshow of the Day.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

For the Benefit of Integrated Google Apps - Be A Killer and Helper

One of the major benefits from Google’s versatile online services is the well-integrated account management in a simple way. This is something the application suite providers always do, and it’s popular for existing users to explore news. As we know, Google acquired Zenter and then relaunched as Google Presentation to be Microsoft PowerPoint killer, now it unveils acquired hosted wiki service Jotspot as Google Sites under the Google Apps team, to be Microsoft SharePoint killer.

Other than its hosted wikis with structured templates, users will now simply embed spreadsheets, presentations and word documents from Google Docs, as well as Google Calendars, YouTube Videos and Picasa Albums. This is the cool point for Google’s online applications to challenge Microsoft. Like Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach said, the success of the killer with combined services is allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive and complicated Microsoft software.

Google’s online applications may not be perfectly sophisticated and stable yet, but it’s really applicable for most businesses. On my viewpoint for business presentation, the integrated system is practicable and valuable.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

How Do You Pick the Right Internet Technology for Management of Enterprise Presentations?

To know some technologies for further activities on Internet as it’s worth the effort.

We are entering an era of online business, and many enterprise managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true applications or experiment with such newcomers as Google Apps. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where “it’s cool” is the most popular definition for Ajax or Flash widgets, we need to make an overview of what’s out there on the rich Internet applications for enterprises. Various techniques and technologies are used for the development of the front end for complex distributed systems in enterprise. Regarding tons of business presentation to share and manage, managers need integrated Internet applications built on existing system.

From the development end, Web application industry is still in the early stages with benefits and shortcomings. However, those titans have started building the framework and market up. Adobe constructs the base using its cross-platform Flash technology, with the advanced support from Adobe Flex and AIR. This solution is really powerful on the root of Flash popularity. Google, the leading Internet competitor, makes the JavaScript way from open source Ajax Frameworks. This combination of JavaScript and DHTML techniques and has recently been used most prominently by Google for its successful projects such as Gmail and Google Maps. But creating a large application in this framework is very difficult to work in developing. Google released the Google Web Toolkit to capture the industry. Recently, Microsoft Silverlight by Microsoft, which can be considered a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), likes to attract the developers with previous development experiences in the field of .NET Framework 3.0 and XAML. Besides, there’re other weaker technologies such as Java applets, ActiveX controls, etc. in the RIA market.

Maybe you’ve heard of these technologies, but for presentations management. Flash development still is the king currently as it could be optimized for general Internet access without too many hassles. As a Flash developer, I clearly know the defects such as loss of visibility to search engines, or Internet connection failure. I cannot tell who will win finally; however, Flash technology seems more friendly for most Internet users.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran