Unlike many other online collaboration services, InstantPresenter does not require you to scale down your PowerPoint Presentation to use with their services. InstantPresenter supports most animations available in PowerPoint, and supports PowerPoint 2007, so you don’t have to downgrade before you upload it to their secure servers.

The full-featured web conferencing service allows you to not only present your PowerPoint slides, but also provides high quality audio and video conferencing services simultaneously, so that you can present your slides as if you were there in person. Other features include online chat, live interactive polling, white-boarding, and screen sharing among others. InstantPresenter’s high-speed, secure servers allow you to archive your presentation for later viewing, or training session, and can support audiences as large as 500 attendees.

ConferencePlus CEO, Tim Reedy:

Our initial launch of Share Portal received an overwhelmingly positive response from our customer base. The excitement has given us tremendous feedback into the direction our customers would like us to take the Share Portal product. In turn, we have moved priorities up the development ladder to get this next release out to our customers, giving them the functionality they want and need,” Mr. Reedy added.

ConferencePlus users that also use Microsoft Office Live Meeting can now utilize the features of both services together by extending the life of their recorded Live Meeting conferences. This new release will allow Share Portal users to store their Live Meetings on the ConferencePlus secured servers, so that they can be downloaded and viewed by specified users. This feature is intended to enhance web conferences and provide customers with the ability to share training and other instruction videos more easily.

Future releases of Share Portal will focus on being able to use other types of content, increased security options and other functionality to enhance the product.

Polycom removes the barrier of distance for companies.

Engel points out that many South African companies have offices situated in more than one major city. Polycom’s high definition video conferencing technology allows people in different locations to conduct fully interactive meetings with high quality audio and video and enables them to share documents digitally, all while staying in the virtual meeting, and again never having to leave the office.

He feels that while there are a wide range of advantages for a company to replace conventional travel with video conferencing, Engel feels that the most important aspect is the opportunity for businesses to go green and help preserve the planet for future generations. The second main advantage of Polycom’s collaboration services is the time that it saves. The technology reduces the time and productivity lost by traveling and the wear and tear on travelers. Reducing conventional travel is also a big cost savings to most companies.

Engel hopes that future legislation will increase the amount of benefits afforded to companies that reduce their carbon footprint, which will likely increase usage and sales of collaboration technologies. companies will be saving money, and carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced. Video conferencing allows companies to make important decisions immediately, which is key to remaining well positioned in today’s evolving markets.

It is a challenging economic time, and companies are looking at cost containment efforts across the board. They can’t stop traveling entirely, so they are looking at ways to travel efficiently, to generate sales and revenue by traveling wisely. Companies like those in the technology industry have clients all over the world. In these cases they are looking at ways to keep travel costs as low as possible.”

In a recent corporate travel spending survey by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, 33 percent of the 131 companies surveyed indicated they would be spending less on travel next year and 31 percent said they would be spending the same — but those spending the same amount would ultimately be traveling less as the cost of travel has climbed significantly.

SkillSoft VP, John Ambrose:

As web conferencing moves into the mainstream, more companies will use it as a substitute for expensive travel. However, I participated in a conference in the U.K. recently dealing with the topic of virtual technologies in business and learning. Almost every speaker lamented the cost, hassle and eco-impact of business travel, and yet, 90 percent of the attendees participated in person, only 10 percent virtually.

Many companies are starting to rely on travel alternatives like web conferencing and video conferencing, which can substantially reduce what a company spends on internal meetings. Procter and Gamble Co. for example has cut 15 percent off its travel budget using travel alternatives such as online PowerPoint meetings.

During a keynote question-and-answer session at the Gartner Inc. conference, Cisco CEO, John Chambers continued to make the argument that videoconferencing can significantly reduce corporate travel. He claimed that Cisco has cut its own travel by 30%, thereby saving his company $150 million, through the use of its telepresence technology, a high definition video conferencing solution now offered by a host of vendors.

Cisco CEO, John Chambers:

Well, the answer is, you are probably going to [have video conferencing on airplanes].

He went on to say that his company predicts that the arrival of high speed internet services and other types of internet connections on planes will enable travelers to hook up devices to the web, and potentially online meetings within the next 18 months or so.

While I understand that most business travelers would like to stay connected throughout their flight, and be able to join in on meetings that they might have otherwise missed while they were airborne, the last thing that I personally want to see is everyone having video conversations on their laptop, gabbing away throughout the flight. I like to enjoy a book, or read the newspaper while I fly, and use the time to take a break from the hustle of daily life. I think an airplane cabin is one location that should stay videoconferencing-free.

Consistently and flow are key elements to a good PowerPoint presentation. When design elements are an addition and not a distraction to a presentation, the audience can stay focused on the content and the key messages being made by the presenter. Here are a couple of ideas in merging multiple presentations.

Have everyone create their presentations with as few design elements as possible. The fewer design elements among the presentations will make it easier in assembling them all together. Designate a single person to assemble the presentation into a final, coherent presentation and make sure that they receive everyone’s *final* contributions them with plenty of time for them to assemble it.

Make sure that there is a single background throughout the entire presentation. Backgrounds are often the most important design element in a PowerPoint presentation, and multiple backgrounds in a single presentation can be very distracting. Use only one or two different fonts throughout the entire online presentation and have all titles and headers positioned similarly and in the same size and font.

Finally, make sure that the amount of information in each section is balanced. If one presenter has their entire presentation verbatim in their slides, while the other presenters (more appropriately) have only notes and highlights, have the verbose presenter rework his slides to complement the design of the final presentation.

Use the Slide Master (View > Master > Slide Master) feature in PowerPoint to change key design elements and headers/footers that will stay consistent throughout the presentation (including date and page numbering). Keep titles and bodies of text in the same location, with the same font size and spacing for a unified look throughout your presentation.

Colors should also complement your theme and background. Titles and text need to sharply contrast the slide’s background so that it’s visible. Your online audience may have their contrast or color balance set differently than your monitor, so while white text on a grey background may be visible enough to you on your monitor, it might be completely invisible to your online audience. Test your entire presentation on a variety of monitors (in a variety of resolutions) to make sure that your presentation will look good for everyone.

Organization

Keep your presentation organized and in a logical order. You want to start with a main topic and then become more specific as you go on. If your topics and chronological order jump back and forth, you will confuse your audience.

Keep Your Slides to a Minimum

Your slides are only there to help illustrate the point or message that you are trying to convey. If you have too many slides or too much information, your audience is going to become uninterested. Unlike presentations that occur in person, online PowerPoint presentations mean that the audience can stop paying attention altogether without being rude to the presenter. You need to keep you audience interested and engaged throughout the presentation.

Speak clearly

When presenting online, voice quality may vary, so it is important to speak loud and clearly so that your audience can hear you. Try to be enthusiastic about your topic and use inflection where appropriate. If you seem disinterested in your material, so will your audience.

Allow time for questions

Make sure that you allow time at the end of your presentation to field questions from your online audience. Many web conferencing tools like InstantPresenter allow audience members to send in questions during the presentation that you can field immediately, or save until the end of the presentation.

Handouts at the end of the presentation

Depending on the material or audience you are presenting to, you may want to send out additional material to you audience for them to review after your presentation. If you do plan to send handouts or pamphlets, let your audience know at the beginning that they will receive material at the end. This will help keep them connected to your presentation. Also be careful not to give them the material before the presentation, because they may feel that they then don’t need to participate in the actual presentation.

The main draw of PowerPoint as a tool, especially in online presentations, is the ability for the presenter to share and convey ideas in a concise manner. This is obviously hard to do when each slide is crammed with numbers and statistics over multiple slides.

To keep the attention of your audience, use pictures that relate to your topic instead of complicated graphs and tables. For instance if you are talking about research and sales of an Alzheimer’s drug, use a picture of an old man or woman. If the statistics are important to your point, only use the key numbers in your presentations and distribute the rest of the data after the presentation for review. Prepare a package of information to email to your audience, and as you begin to get into the numbers, let them know that you will be mailing them this information at the end of the presentation. If they have this information at the start of the presentation, they may feel that sitting through the online PowerPoint presentation isn’t necessary.

AuthorSTREAM’s Present Live has a very simple and straight forward interface to get your PowerPoint presentation online easily and quickly. The service is very user-friendly with a fast upload of the presentation. Once the presentation is on their servers, you need only to click on the “Present Live” button to share the presentation with whomever you choose. Present Live is geared not only towards small businesses that have remote offices and work forces in disparate locations, but also to schools with virtual classrooms.

AuthorSTREAM supports all PowerPoint animations, so you don’t have to downgrade your presentation to stream it through the service. You can chat with everyone watching the PowerPoint presentation in a common chat area, to field questions and explain aspects of the presentation in greater detail. While online PowerPoint presentations aren’t a new technology, the simplicity and ease of use of this product make it a winner. Best of all, Present live is free.