Improving the Reliability of your Digital Signage When Using PowerPoint Content

Just about everyone who has an ounce of creative force in them knows how to create a PowerPoint file.  While it might not be the most powerful way to create high quality slides for your digital signage, it certainly has a couple of great things going for it: accessibility and approachability. However, you should think about converting those PowerPoint files to boost reliability of your signage.

Nearly everyone has PowerPoint installed on their computers as part of the Microsoft Office package plus most people have used it making the learning curve smaller to create slides and announcements for your digital signage.

Our experience has shown that there are several reasons PowerPoint is not very well suited for digital signage however:

• First, to keep the cost of players down, you would likely want to go with the PowerPoint viewer rather than a full copy of Office.  Problem is, the PowerPoint view only plays presentations in full screen mode.  Not a very good solution for signage with multiple zones within the layout.
• Secondly, PowerPoint is a resource hog and can crash or experience memory leaks when run 24/7.  Your system needs to be more reliable than that.

One solution we recommend is to convert your PowerPoint files to Flash SWF files.  Flash files are like movie clips and they will essentially capture all the animations and transitions from your presentation.  They are smaller in size and will play more reliability than a full PowerPoint file.

We have tested a couple of free converters but the results aren’t typically very good.  Two we have tested that are good are iSpring Pro and AuthorPoint.  Both are great for converting, and have tons of options.

iSpring Pro has an academic license version for you folks in K-12 or Higher Ed you can view here:   http://www.ispringsolutions.com/purchase/academic_license_request.html

For more information on the product, http://www.ispringsolutions.com/index.html?ad=adw&kwid=1fheva2nmb&gclid=CP6wycmZkJwCFRHxDAodxFXqYA“>click here.

authorPoint also has a “Lite” edition that’s worth trying to see if it fits your needs.  Check out the comparison here:  http://www.authorgen.com/authorpoint/compare.aspx