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SlideRocket, which makes a Web presentation platform using Adobe’s Flex software development kit, is looking to attract more sales and marketing teams to use its popular application.
The company Sept. 29 released SlideRocket Sales & Marketing Edition, adding sharing, permissions and control features to boost security for presentations being shared with multiple users.
Users of SlideRocket Sales & Marketing Edition can make presentations available to all users via a simple URL, or share a presentation with a specific group by e-mailing a special link to the content.
Password protection ensures the presentation is only seen by the intended audience. New permissions also dictate who may print or embed a presentation once it’s been viewed. The Sales & Marketing Edition also features an option to set expiration dates to prohibit parties from accessing presentations after a certain date.
In a thinly veiled jab at Microsoft’s leading PowerPoint presentation application, SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich said presentation technology is a 25-year-old technology where people create a digital brochure, save it and send it to people.
This static document is insufficient for today’s business climate, where knowledge workers are sharing content and information online, often in real time. SlideRocket aims to change that perception with its cloud-based offering.
“Our whole vision is taking the power and value of the Internet or the cloud to presentations,” Dietrich told eWEEK. Targeting salespeople and marketers makes perfect sense because presentations, along with e-mail, are one of the key tools sales and marketing professionals use every day to get their jobs done.
It also marks a sharper enterprise focus for SlideRocket, which Dietrich said has focused on media, advertising and entertainment markets, or other companies that had a specific brand to promote.
SlideRocket isn’t the only vendor looking to break Microsoft’s stranglehold on the market for presentation software. Google, Zoho and Adobe all offer cloud-based presentation applications. However, while those vendors offer presentation applications as part of broader software suites that include word processing and spreadsheet applications, SlideRocket is the rare company selling only a presentation application.
That makes it challenging for SlideRocket. It could also make it a target for a company looking to buy a presentation application instead of building one.
SlideRocket Sales & Marketing Edition doesn’t address the security aspects of presentation sharing.
A new SlideRocket Portable Presentation feature lets sales and marketers give a presentation without worrying about connectivity or hardware compatibility issues and without the need for a specialized player. Users can export their presentations and e-mail them, or save the files on hard drives or USB drives.
The solution also includes a tool that lets users create groups of married slides that can be searched and dragged and dropped directly into presentations. In addition, the solution leverages SlideRocket’s existing analytics capabilities, which tell users when a presentation is opened, if it was forwarded and on which slides the viewer stayed the longest.