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Asp.net, PowerPoint, and my undying soul

A

Arcex

Senior member
We have a website and we are trying to imbed PowerPoint presentations into it for training purposes. Remote user logs in, goes to the training portal, selects the presentation, clicks through like normal. We have some special transition effects and screen captures which run automatically and then move to the next slide.

What we are looking for is a way to imbed PowerPoint into the webpage so the remote user will not need PowerPoint on their local PC. I have found multiple sites that allow you to upload a PowerPoint presentation where it will be hosted remotely, unfortunately all of the sites I have found that offer this change many things with the presentation itself, formatting and, more importantly, the screen captures fail to work since with PowerPoint the files have to be stored locally on the webserver the file is playing from.

So, does anyone know of a way to imbed PowerPoint in a website? I mentioned Asp.net since thats what our web applications are coded in. If there is a plugin we would have to purchase to imbed we are fine with that, but I can't find one. Can anyone help?

Please?
 
embed...

You can convert powerpoint to flash and then embed that in the webpage. You might be able to do it automatically on upload.
 
We don't want to convert to another type of file, we will be doing regular updates to the presentations so it's far easier for us to keep them as PowerPoint files. Also, a large part of the new training is click-thru pages so the people can progress at their own pace, assuming that could be done in Flash it would be, I'm sure, more work and we are on a time crunch (unheard of in the tech world, I know).
 
You guys use SharePoint internally?

Even with the OpenXML standard, M$ has done a pathetic job in coming up with an API. Look up things like Office Automation (the freaking documentation is under Office for VBA - lol), but even then, manipulating the files will be tedious if not impossible.

Refer to these links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735940.aspx and http://support.microsoft.com/?id=257757

If you find a full-blown solution, please share.
 
If you need the actual PowerPoint document, maybe like Atheus said it is possible to either a.) store the PowerPoint files in a database or b.) store them on the file system and a reference to the filename in a database, and then convert the PowerPoint to Flash on the server before it is displayed. That way you keep your PowerPoint document on hand as well as have the Flash viewing capability.
 
SharePoint would probably be the easiest for you. You can edit the files right on the server, it provides for automagic versioning, and you can restrict files on a fairly granular basis. Plus, it's free. I believe the "webpart" you'll need is a "Document Center".
 
I doubt they would want to go the SharePoint route, we are still on Office 2003 for some specific reasons, not the least of which 2007 is a PITA, but I doubt I could justify the cost of a SharePoint Server just to display some PowerPoint presentations.

As for the Flash option, again, would that keep the existing transition effects? Some of them are key to how the presentation is displayed, for example with the screen capture videos the slide has to be set to automatically proceed to the next slide once the movie finishes playing, for everything else the user has to click to proceed. Would this stay the same in Flash, or would it require extra coding?

Anydraw looks promising, and an option like that will probably be the logical conclusion, the only thing I am trying to avoid is having the user required to download and install an Active X control. all else being equal it's minor, but for the majority of our field employees any extra step like that causes a sizable increase in the number of Help Desk calls.
 
SharePoint services is free and included in Server 2003 R2 and SBS 2003.

What you need is a document management solution, and SharePoint is by far the cheapest (because it's free).

You don't need the full SharePoint Server for this purpose.
 
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