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Webcasting Software: Page 4 of 15

PresenterPro has two software components: a management station and a video-encoder controller, which work with Apache and other PHP-based Web servers, IIS-based servers, and Real and Windows Media Services. We dedicated one computer to management and encoding, and put IIS with Windows Media Services software on a second machine to handle the Web and streaming services.


At the Windows-based management station, which comprises a presentation wizard, presentation manager and archive manager, you prepare presentations, control all the action and publish the results. The video encoder controller captures and encodes both video and audio streams with Windows Media or Real Encoder, while the Web and streaming servers store the final presentation for on-demand playback. Of the three competitors, only Accordent supports Real.

The presentation wizard, which lets you choose interface options and conference features, gave us better control over our presentation's skin than the other two products. From the wizard, we chose the skin and conference features and customized our title information. You also can create your own skins--something you cannot do with Communicast's and Sonic Foundry's products. Although you must code the skins manually, the program has some common sense built in. For example, the skins must be germane to the features of the presentation. If a skin doesn't have an "Ask a Question" button, you won't be able to use PresenterPro's Q&A feature.

Once we chose our presentation features, we imported the PowerPoint presentation and converted it to JPEG files (GIF is also an option). We then published the base HTML and graphic files to the Web server. PresentationPro lets you publish data to as many as six locations simultaneously. Mediasite uploads data to only one server. This process is unnecessary with Communicast. Once these tasks complete, we were done with the staging portion.

Just before recording the actual webcast, you open the presentation manager, which controls the presentation's beginning and end and the slide cycling. With the presentation manager, you can create interactive content, such as simple statements, survey forms and trivia questions, as well as images and Web page URLs. This material appears in the viewer's slide display or a separate window. Surveys can remain active after the presentation is finished, so on-demand users can still vote and participate. We found we needed a second person--a webcast director--to push out the interactive content, as the speaker was too busy presenting. The director can cycle the slides manually or use a PowerPoint add-in to synchronize with the presenter's computer. We wish the presentation manager had a remotely accessible Web front end, instead of requiring a Win32 app.