What’s Hot.
Sharing capabilities; Flashy transitions; Access to slides from anywhere
What’s Not.
Importing certain features is hit or miss; Chart and shape creating capabilities could be improved; No importing / exporting with Keynote
The bottom line.
Users should expect some bumps in the road while using this newer application, but it’s definitely worth a shot, especially for business use. SlideRocket’s sharing capabilities alone make it valuable to those who frequently work with remote colleagues.
Launched in the Fall of 2007, SlideRocket is a web-based application that allows users to create presentations online with features similar to those of PowerPoint and Keynote. The application, built on Adobe’s Flex platform, features many professional-grade design tools and includes libraries that centralize slides and share presentations and objects within a company. SlideRocket’s flash-based remote meeting capability is especially helpful because users will not need to download additional applications to view presentations. Overall, the SlideRocket’s interface will prove more familiar to Windows users, but Mac lovers will pick it up with minimal effort.
Designing & Editing
Although SlideRocket doesn’t include as many tools as PowerPoint and Keynote, the application does provide some impressive effects, builds and transitions. Arguably flashier than PowerPoint, SlideRocket features some sophisticated 3-D transitions that look more like those of Keynote and work with Mac, PC and Linux systems. It includes not only graph and table styling tools, but also the ability to add 3rd-party plug-ins o presentations. Overall, SlideRocket features enough tools to design and edit any presentation, but some remain a bit lacking. Most notably, shape formatting tools and chart capabilities could use some improvement.
Importing
Users can import and export PowerPoint files to and from SlideRocket. Keynote users will be disappointed, however, to learn that SlideRocket doesn’t do the same with Keynote files. Importing files is a mixed bag of success. SlideRocket might reduce font sizes and change or erase objects and charts altogether. Font size is easy enough to change, but you might do better to recreate objects and charts in SlideRocket.
Users can also import their own fonts, images and flash animations. SlideRocket will only import flash videos, which might frustrate users who work with other video files. If you need to search for images, you can find them in the community clip art library or purchase them from a collection of stock photos all within SlideRocket. You can also import photos and videos from Flickr and YouTube without leaving the SlideRocket application.
Sharing
SlideRocket allows users to share presentations publicly or with selected people. It also assigns an embed code and a URL address to all uploaded presentations so that users can email links to others or embed presentations in other web pages. If you share your presentations, collaborators can update slides, although I’m not clear as to whether SlideRocket will allow you to withhold editing access from that colleague with too many opinions who always criticizes your work. If you like to monitor your colleagues, you’ll be particularly pleased with SlideRocket’s statistics feature, which allows you to see who viewed presentation and the time they spent on each slide.
Although it still needs to iron out some minor kinks, SlideRocket allows you to access presentations anywhere, which is a gift to those of us who might forget, say, small objects like flash drives or larger objects like laptops when traveling for business. If you would like to try SlideRocket without committing, you can access a free trial at www.sliderocket.com.
