A follow up on yesterday’s post: the basic mechanism of the PowerPoint plug in works. I can side load the app in a task panel, let users log in, you can search for templates, to add a slide to your presentation I can only open it as a new presentation with 1 slide at the moment, you have to copy the slide across to your own file.

It is fascinating to see all the stages this slide goes through (automated mostly):

• I design the slide in the SlideMagic app

• Upload them to the template server

• The server converts them to PowerPoint and create screenshots

• The server updates the tags

• PowerPoint connects to the server and loads the side panel

• User logs in, and searches

• PowerPoint loads the PPTX file from the SlideMagic server

As soon as you download the SlideMagic slides into PowerPoint you instantly see the strength of SlideMagic when it comes to adjusting templates. Try adding a row to the SWOT diagram, it is hard.

I am not expecting to unseat PowerPoint’s install base any time soon, and the optimal situation would be where both applications can work together nicely. A robust plug in can help users who are hesitant to make the full switch to SlideMagic (and included in these users are people that work for companies that have very tough security policies to run software from new vendors on corporate machines.)

The next step is to make the plugin robust and get it distributed properly in the Office app store. Work in progress