PowerPoint 2010 Fun - Broadcast Slide Show (and your viewers only need IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+ or Chrome)

The Productivity Hub - Present to a remote audience over the Internet with PowerPoint 2010

"If you want to let remote team members watch your presentation, PowerPoint 2010 has a great feature for you. All they need to view your slideshow is Internet access, a Live ID (or account on another supported presentation service), and the latest version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari for Mac.

Here's how it works:

Open the slide deck you're presenting, go to the Slide Show tab, and click the Broadcast Slide Show button:

..."

Using PowerPoint 2010's Broadcast Slide Show feature is almost too easy. I mean, in my playing with it, it just "seems to work." There's no client side setup, no client install, no add-ins, no port problems, inside/outside firewalls, etc, etc... Even many of the transitions/animations work too. It just seems to work.

The presenter needs PowerPoint 2010 and a Live ID and the viewers need a modern browser (and a Live ID too I believe). But that's it.

The Presenter initiates the broadcast which uploads the presentation to the broadcast server (hosted by Microsoft, but you can add others) and gets a URL. They send the URL to the viewers via IM, Email, etc. Then when everyone is ready, the presenter starts the slideshow. As they move through the deck, forward or back or slide hunt and peck, all the viewer's are kept in sync.

The magic behind this is Office Web Apps... So again, your viewers are not seeing some kind of video stream thing, but actually seeing a web rendering of the deck/slide.

It's really pretty neat.

Here's a a few snaps from a deck I just whipped together and broadcast to a a number of different viewers; Chrome, IE8, IE9, a viewer/client machine with PowerPoint 2003, and into a machine behind a corporate firewall. And each one "just worked"

Got the URL from the presenter and waiting for them to start the slideshow...

Slideshow has been started and all the viewers get the first slide...

The presenter moves to the next slide (page down in this case) and then all the viewers are moved to it too...

And here's the deck in PowerPoint 2010;

I commonly print out my decks so my attendees can get an easy to see, local image, etc, of what I'm presenting. But since in my case everyone has notebooks, I'm now thinking about stopping the tree killing and just sending everyone a broadcast URL... hum