Apoorv Durga's Blog

In my role, I have to talk to clients almost everyday and give them a presentation about our Portals and CM expertise. A major part of that is Case Studies. Because of the nature of things here, the format of powerpoint slides for case studies changes very frequently even though the content of a case study remains more or less similar - Challenges, How we did it, Business benefits etc.

I've been wondering if I could use some sort of a CMS and input all these things as text and then depending on Client or context, just generate a different PPT.

The good and ever helpful folks at cms-forum gave me some good pointers. Although I cannot use Powerpoint but their are really good alternatives such as:

1. S5 by Eric Meyer - http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
2. John Cox's implementation at
   http://www.wyome.com/index.php?module=articles&func=view&ptid=11&theme=slideshow_manta
3. http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/Open/PloneS5
4. http://www.visiomode.com/slideshow/
5. http://www.feedstream.com/XML2Flash/Demo1/Presentation.htm
6. http://www.reportlab.org/python_point.html

(2), (3) and (4) above are basically implementations of Eric's S5. I like the idea and have been playing around with them. My main problem is that I donot know PHP and Python. So i am planning to borrow this idea and integrate it with OpenCMS or some other java based system. The idea is simple - Generate an html (or JSP) file and apply S5 templates over that.