This chapter contains another series of example Web-based applications for your Intranet. In it, you learn about enabling your customers to conduct computer-based training courses and business presentations using World Wide Web technology.
You'll be able to use the information in this chapter in numerous ways, including setting up training for your customers in the use of your Intranet itself. As with the other examples shown, your customer's home base is his Web browser. In some cases, the customer's Web browser itself will be the means of the training or presentation; in others, Web browser helper applications will be called to perform the task, with the Web browser as the supervisor of the process. Overall, your Intranet can be an important part of your company's training and business presentation program.
In Chapter 27, "Collaboration on Your Intranet," you'll see some of the same facilities discussed in this chapter put to use in a different context. As you've seen frequently in this book, your Web-based toolkit is a versatile one, enabling you to use individual pieces of it in new and varied combinations to develop completely new ways of using your Intranet. What you learn about in this chapter is no exception to this.
The overhead projector and a stack of transparencies are the everyday tools of the professor, the salesperson, and the corporate executive. Laptop computers outfitted with special hardware and software to replicate the transparency are dragged to presentations. While the art of the slide show is advanced by such hardware and software, participants are still left sitting in the dark looking at transparencies that are all-too-often hard to see, and holding paper printouts of the slides that they can't read in the dark.
Wouldn't it be better if your customers could sit at workstations, or at their own desks, and see the presentation or training slides onscreen as it was meant to look? And, because this book is all about using Web and related technology for everyday work purposes, wouldn't it be great if they could do all this using their Web browser? Let's take a look at how you can have slide show presentations on your Intranet, using simple tools and your customers' Web browsers.
With very basic HTML coding, you can put a slide show on the Web. Figure 26.1 shows a sample screen of a presentation that you might even be thinking about giving to upper management next week. You might think of it as sort of a "Poor Man's PowerPoint."
Figure 26.1: Simple slide show prepared in HTML.
The HTML code behind this simple screen appears in Listing 26.1. The filename is Slide Show.htm on the CD-ROM.
Listing 26.1. This basic HTML code can be used as a template
to create simple slide shows on the Web.
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Why We Need an Intranet</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Why We Need An Intranet</H1> <HR> <IMG SRC="BL_DIAM.gif"> To share documents.<P> <IMG SRC="BL_DIAM.gif"> To track company sales figures.<P> <IMG SRC="BL_DIAM.gif"> To diagram emergency exits.<P> <HR> <PRE WIDTH=132> <IMG SRC="L_HAND.gif">BACK NEXT<IMG SRC="R_HAND.gif"> </PRE> </BODY> </HTML>
You'll notice that the HTML code in Listing 26.1 refers to a few
GIF files. The bullet image and the pointing hand images are included
on the CD-ROM. You could reuse the graphics and easily adapt the
HTML code to serve as a template for your own slide shows on the
Web.
| Note |
If you adapt the HTML code to the Slide Show.htm file, don't forget to surround the <IMG> tags of the Back and Next buttons with <A HREF> tags hyperlinking to the appropriate documents in your presentation. It would also be a good idea to include an additional button on each screen to return to a Table of Contents document, like a slide show home page. |
If you want to show a customer group how to use their Web browsers to search and retrieve text data, for example, you can prepare a slide show that runs through example searches with your explanatory slides written in HTML, containing hyperlinks to your Intranet's real fill-in search forms. The previously static slide show then becomes interactive. The ability to pause indefinitely, together with the hyperlinks contained in your training slides, gives your class the opportunity to actually use the services on which they're being trained, live and right in the classroom. And the instructor always has the ability, by controlling the return to the fixed part of the slide show or presentation, to bring students back from their interactive wanderings.
As you'll see in the next section, widely available Web browser helper applications for Windows can provide high-quality slide shows and presentations for your pc users.
You can use a wide range of helper applications for Intranet training and presentation purposes, with your Web pages providing smooth access to various kinds of information that might be included in an overall curriculum. Let's look separately at a couple of very useful helpers, Microsoft PowerPoint and Lotus ScreenCam. Both are excellent packages that you can use for your purposes, but, as you'll learn a little later, your Intranet presents quite flexible training and presentation opportunities, and you won't want to limit yourself to just these two packages, or any other single package, regardless of how great they might be.
In Chapter 15, "Other Client Applications on the Intranet," you learned how to set up the Microsoft PowerPoint presentation program as a Web browser application. For your training and presentation purposes, users can access and view PowerPoint slide shows easily, provided they have access to PowerPoint itself, or the read-only PowerPoint viewer available on this CD-ROM and at Microsoft's Web site, http://www.microsoft.com.
You may need to refer back to Chapters 12-15
for specifics on setting up PowerPoint datafiles as a new MIME
data type/subtype on your Web server.
| Note |
Microsoft has recently posted an announcement on their Web site that is of great relevance to the topic of slide shows and presentations on the Web. As you learned in Chapter 17, ActiveX is a new technology available in Internet Explorer 3.0 (and above) and as a plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 (and above) that enables page designers to create truly interactive client/server applications on the Web. As proof of this concept, Microsoft is making available a free download of a beta ActiveX product that provides PowerPoint viewing directly inside the browser. They call it the ActiveX Animation Publisher & Player (two programs). The Publisher requires PowerPoint for Windows 95 or Windows NT. Check out this URL for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/mspowerpoint/ |
Once a customer has downloaded a PowerPoint slide show file and the application has started, she can view the slide show just as if it had been created on her own pc or as if she were sitting in a conference room. To start a PowerPoint slide show, pull down the View menu and select Slide Show. The resulting dialog box will prompt you for specifics.
Slide show presentations using PowerPoint as a Web browser helper
application are an excellent means of self-paced training exercises.
Customers can download and run them at their convenience, page
through them, save or print individual slides, and so on. Using
this mechanism in a group training room can, however, be a bit
difficult to coordinate. In such a situation, each student independently
downloads a copy of the same slide presentation and views it on
his or her own workstation. Keeping everyone on the same page
might present problems, but no more so than those that occur when
presenters provide paper handouts of slides.
| Tip |
A bonus to using PowerPoint as a helper application for presentations and training classes is that customers can use PowerPoint interactively during the presentation. While some users might get distracted by this capability, the ability to view the overall structure of a presentation in PowerPoint's Outline view mode can be useful. In addition, class or presentation participants have the ability to save or print the slides for permanent reference, or to steal material for use as models for other slide shows. |
As you may know, Lotus ScreenCam is a Windows software package which can be likened to your home VCR. Like a video camera, the ScreenCam recorder software records all on-screen activity on your pc, including mouse movements and clicks, the opening and closing of programs, and so on. It's frequently used to produce software demos and training sessions. The ScreenCam player plays back previously recorded ScreenCam sessions using the VCR metaphor, with start, stop, rewind, and fast-forward buttons.
Lotus has made the ScreenCam player freely available; you'll find it at Lotus' Web site, http://www.lotus.com/intrprod/2142.htm. (The ScreenCam recorder is not freely available, but must be purchased from Lotus; it costs about $100. However, I'm told that it is free with Lotus SmartSuite.)
Figure 26.2 shows the ScreenCam player in action in a demonstration of the Ami Pro word processor (also from Lotus). As you can see, the ScreenCam controller window in the lower right of the screenshot has VCR-like buttons to allow the demo to be played, paused, rewound, have new demos loaded, and so on.
Figure 26.2: Lotus ScreenCam playing a demonstration of Ami Pro.
While ScreenCam can be run as a stand-alone application, as you probably expect, you can also set up the ScreenCam player as a Web browser helper application for your customers. Doing so enables you to use the package as a part of your Intranet training program to display sessions you record with the ScreenCam recorder or obtain from vendors. The configuration of the ScreenCam player as a helper application is much the same as that for other helpers:
As with Microsoft PowerPoint slide shows, ScreenCam presentations and training sessions can be self-paced, run at customer convenience right from the customer's own Web browser. ScreenCam has important features not present in any slide show package, because the customer is viewing a complete session rather than frozen slides with screenshots. Every mouse movement, click, and screen change are shown in a ScreenCam presentation, while slides have a completely different purpose (the latter being more static, of course).
In a group training session, ScreenCam adds its advantages to those described with respect to PowerPoint, and your overall training program can profit from using it. You can use the ScreenCam recorder to provide training to your customers on the use of the various parts of your Intranet itself, and recording sample sessions in Explorer or Netscape for playback by customers, or in training sessions. The ability to pause, rewind, fast-forward, and the like using the VCR buttons is quite important because customers can go back to see earlier parts of the recording.
ScreenCam has, however, some features that might be considered both advantages and disadvantages compared to the other helper applications your customers might use. Most importantly, ScreenCam recordings are read-only. They can be viewed again and again but not changed in any way. Customers who view them can't save them to review later (although they can reload them with their Web browser) nor modify them for their own presentations as they can with word processor, spreadsheet, or PowerPoint datafiles.
ScreenCam, too, is subject to the whims of meeting participants or trainees, in that each customer, having downloaded his own copy of the demo recording, is free to fast-forward, rewind, and otherwise ignore the progress of the meeting or training class. Again, this happens in every presentation or training class ever conducted, regardless of the presentation media, and there's nothing at all you can do about it.
Finally, you should note that, with a room full of students downloading a ScreenCam recording from your Web server all at once, getting everyone's viewing of the demo synchronized can be a slight problem. ScreenCam recordings can be quite large, and download time over your Intranet may be affected by multiple simultaneous downloads in a classroom setting. Each session will start separately, and may well do so at different times. The stage of the demo that individual customers are viewing at any given time will differ unless you're able to get them all to pause the demo at the same place and restart it together.
As it did with the first graphical Web browser and the leading freeware Web server, ncSA has also led the way in Web-based training with its outstanding Web-related tutorials. You'll find a list of them at this URL:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/
You'll no doubt use these extensively as you set up and refine your Intranet and its capabilities, but you'll want to look at them in the context of this chapter's subject matter as well. Completely apart from their (very important) subject matter, the ncSA tutorials are great examples of how to use the Web as a training mechanism.
Another excellent (and relevant) example is the Microsoft Visual Basic Script Tutorial at this URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/vbscript/us/vbstutor/vbstutor.htm
As you can see from the VBScript tutorial in Figure 26.3, the student can simply follow the logical steps laid out at the top level to work his way through the course systematically.
Figure 26.3: The Microsoft Visual Basic Script tutorial is well presented.
As you work your way through the VBScript tutorial, you'll find a nice, logical organization is followed consistently throughout. You'll notice that every page in the series contains a button back to the Table of Contents and to the previous and next training screen. Furthermore, the row of buttons appears identically at both the top and bottom of each HTML page. When I read through the screens, I found that I was occasionally scrolling up and down before going to the next page-and having buttons at both the top and bottom of long HTML pages proved to be a pleasant convenience.
The ncSA and Microsoft tutorials I just mentioned are great as a starting point because they show you the basics of how the Web can be used for training purposes. However, your Intranet is a multimedia system, with plain text, graphical images, sounds, video, and various other kinds of data accessible using the Web browser helper applications you've set up for your customers. This being the case, you won't want to limit your Intranet-based training and presentations to a single, text-based method.
Plain-text HTML markup with logically arranged hyperlinks, PowerPoint, Netscape Remote, Mosaic ccI, and ScreenCam are all great tools, but the overwhelming value of an Intranet like yours, as this book has hammered home repeatedly, is the ability to combine all these tools into something uniquely suited to your organization's needs. Using your Intranet as a training resource is no exception. There's absolutely no reason you can't use all of these tools as part of a single training session or presentation, picking and choosing each one based on its strengths at presenting the particular information you need to show at a given point in your presentation. Here are some things to keep in mind in putting together your Intranet-based training:
It's easy to get lost in the details of setting up a complex helper application and lose sight of the basics of training design for your Intranet. The glue that holds the training course together is, of course, the HTML documents that contain it. While this fact may be implicit in the last few paragraphs, it needs to be underscored here.
Like your training curriculum itself, your Web training pages need to be well thought out. Moreover, your planning needs to be done from a point of view that takes into account the important idea of using appropriate Intranet tools throughout a course. While this requires you to use an expanded horizon in planning your Intranet-based training, it also gives you incredible flexibility.
Using Web technology for training is superior to any other single technology, simply because you can use all those other technologies as you need them to form an overall Intranet training curriculum. If you need to show a picture to illustrate a point, for instance, add an image to your training page; a sound or movie, add an audio or video link; or a complex scientific application, add the application itself as a helper application.
If you have a corporate training staff, get them involved in your Intranet training. Professional instructors know, from being on their feet in front of students, how to design training curricula. Put your collective heads together to develop training that uses the capabilities of your Intranet to their fullest extent.
Training and business presentations using your Intranet have been the focus of this chapter. Your Intranet is an enormous potential source of training resources for your customers. Moreover, an Intranet, with all its multimedia capabilities, makes completely new ways of creating and executing training and presentations possible, because you can stitch together a wide range of training components. You'll want to give free rein to your imagination in putting together your Intranet's tools for these purposes. As a review, here's what you've done in this chapter:
In Chapter 27, you turn your attention to tools you can use to facilitate collaboration and cooperation among your Intranet's customers.