Anystream Apreso - Page 4

Continued from Page 3

Working the Workspace
Pricing And Support
Awards
Conclusion

Working the Workspace

Choose any Apreso on the top pane and right-click to view a context menu - most of these options are available from the toolbar icons and menu choices as well.

The Distribute option allows you to select a Publish Point.

The Copy, Paste, Delete, Rename and Select All options are self explanatory - they work across Publish Points.

Mail Recipient (as Web Link) option is active only when you choose an online Publish Point - this allows you to send an email that contains a link to an online Apreso.

Similarly, the Mail Recipient (as Attachment) sends the entire Apreso as an attachment to a recipient.

Burn Items to CD works only on Windows XP (not Windows 2000) and allows you to burn your Apreso to a CD as long as you have a CD writer. You can still burn your Apresos to CD if you have Windows 2000; just that you have to use the software that came with your CD recorder instead of doing it from within Apreso. With Windows XP, Apreso can use the system level CD burning capability that's native to the newer OS.

The Modify Organization Logo allows you to add or change a logo to your Apreso presentations - you'll need to keep a logo ready in BMP, PNG, TIF, JPG or GIF formats with dimensions that match 200 x 50 pixels.

Close Captioning Support enables this option and provides some choices.

Export to Producer 2003 is among Apreso's most revolutionary options - your original PowerPoint presentation along with your video and sound recordings is exported to the Producer 2003 format. Producer 2003 is an online rich media add-in for PowerPoint that can be downloaded free from the Microsoft site.

The Convert Presentation options allows you to convert a video Apreso presentation to an audio-only Apreso, ”re-skin” it with a different template or update information about the Apreso (author, title, description).

View Presentation allows you to view your Apreso.

Pricing And Support

Apreso retails for US$199 for the audio-video version and US$129 for the audio-only version. However, do check out the Apreso site - as I write this, you get both versions for US$149 and US$99. You also get volume discounts.

Educational institutions get a discount - you'll find more info on the Apreso buy page...

About support, I myself had a problem when I could not get any dialog box to appear even after choosing the Configure option. In around 4 email messages both ways within an hour, my problem was resolved. I wrote back to them to compliment for the exemplary service.

The Apreso site has a FAQ and knowledge base - email and phone support is also available.

Awards

Darian reminded me gently about the awards that Apreso has won - so here it is in her own words:

Apreso for PowerPoint, and Apreso Online, were announced at COMDEX on November 17th, 2003. I think I’ve told you that since COMDEX we’ve been honored by PC Mag as a finalist for their 2003 Technical Excellence Awards, finalist for COMDEX Best of Show, and we also received a Standing Ovation award from Presentations Magazine – so we ended the year with a bang!

Thank you, Darian.

Conclusion

This has been a long review - you all know that I had to work so many hours with Apreso to get so far!

I'll say Apreso certainly is the product that Microsoft Producer hoped to be. I love the way Apreso provides options to do what I want - for instance, let's assume I'm using Apreso and my next logical thought is that it would be good to have a certain feature - nine times of ten, I found that Apreso indeed provided that option!

There are some problems too - I wish there was on option to copy an entire Apreso to a folder on my hard disk without having to designate it as a Publish Point. Also, sometime in the future, it would be good to have an option that allows copying multiple Apresos to CD with an option to include a master Apreso that links them all - that way I could send all my Apresos to a conference that I cannot attend!

Having put across the pros and cons, I find that the pros far outweigh the cons - Apreso is indeed a revolutionary product that does not stop at just getting your ideas across to the whole world out there - it goes further and creates an entire presentation workflow. It's pricing is good to - reasonable and sensible enough to be deployed across organizations.