I’m convinced since some time that wikis are great tools for companies. They are open, easy and fast to use, well, they just work. Ross Mayfield understood this early and his company sells a wiki for businesses (and he seems to be doing great). Since a few weeks I’ve had the chance to experiment it myself since Skype uses extensively a wiki for internal communication.

A wiki can replace many of the Word documents used in today’s companies. This is indeed the case at Skype, all documents for internal usage are on the wiki, not in a word processor format stored on some shared drive. But slide shows are still done the old way, as Powerpoint of Open Office file and uploaded as an “attachment” of a wiki page. This isn’t great for sharing and doesn’t provide the level of collaborative work a wiki allows.

A good solution to solve this is S5 Presents, a web-based application written by Lucas Carlson, which allows to create slide show online.

S5 Presents is based on S5, an amazing slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as described by the author Eric Meyer himself:

With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

Just try it out.

S5 Presents uses S5 to create a web application that allows to create slide show online without writing any HTML. It would be a great addition to a wiki. Presentations are created online are stored centrally. The themes are also located online and when the company decides to change its logo colour, all presentations, including old ones, will use the new design.

It took me 2 minutes to create a new presentation, and the tool is as simple to use as a wiki. S5 Presents should be improved to allow multiple user to edit a presentation. An export function would also allow to view presentations when being offline.

There is some potential for a nice web based application there, following the 37 signals principles.

By the way, back in October 2004 I wrote about the mind mapping tool FreeMind and how it can help taking notes and brainstorming. I wrote later a little script to convert a FreeMind file into a slideshow that uses the S5 slide show tool. Also, at the MindManager blog, they explain how to blog better using a mind mapping tool. This makes good sense for longer posts.

wiki, s5

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 10:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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