INVITES: The invites can be found at the end of this article.

I had the great opportunity on Friday to chat with Mitch Grasso, CEO and co-founder of SlideRocket. Mitch gave me a great deal of insight into the history of SlideRocket, their current development, and where he sees SlideRocket heading in the future. I did my best to get all of the questions answered that you guys requested.

Brief History

The initial idea for SlideRocket came to Mitch and co-founder Mike Lingle in early 1996. This goal was to create an online application that could equal the functionality of applications like Powerpoint. When Flex came around, Mitch knew this application could really happen. After they started planning - they realized that this project wouldn't just do what PowerPoint does, but rather it would begin where PowerPoint left off creating a new breed of presentation application.

Mitch's emphasis was different from some in the beginning. Mitch told me that he didn't buy into the 'People only use 10% of the application' style of development. He stated that while this may be true, he would rather provide 100% of the functionality, and then let the user decide which percentage to use. He also mentioned that in his view, the reason many of the other RIA's that follow the 10% rule, generally follow the rule because their technology will not let them do any more than 10%. This is one of the reasons why Mitch said he chose Flex for SlideRocket.

Collaboration Model

I personally believe that the benefits of RIA's can best be seen in the new collaboration models that they create - and SlideRocket is no exception. Mitch explained to me how the shared media libraries can work. He explained that if a marketing department had a set of slides that were available to other departments - marketing could control what the other departments could edit. In addition, if the marketing department decided to change a slide, it would automatically update all of the slides in any presentation that was currently using it. This would just not be possible within traditional tools like PowerPoint.

The collaboration tools are currently in development, and according to Mitch some element of them will be included with the public beta.

Figure 1. Media Library

Presentation Analytics

Another new feature the Mitch highlighted was presentation analytics. I must agree with him that this is another feature that sets SlideRocket apart from the traditional desktop alternatives. This feature allows you to get detailed information on who is watching your presentation - and more importantly how they are watching it. By giving you a detailed breakdown of each slide, you can see what information is effective.

Figure 2. Analytics Report

AIR Support

Several people requested information about AIR support for SlideRocket. Nate (from SlideRocket) responded to a comment on the Call For Questions, and gave us the URL for the current AIR application which allows for caching presentations on the local hard drive - as well as presenting them. The AIR application still seems to be a bit buggy, so I certainly wanted to ask Mitch about the future plans for it.

Mitch informed me that the goal is to create an AIR application that includes all of the functionality of SlideRocket. He even stated that he believes most users will eventually migrate to the AIR version over the online Flex version of the application.

SlideRocket AIR Application: http://www.sliderocket.com/airinstall/

Printing and Export Support

Mitch let me know that there will be some new options coming for printing and exporting as well. They plan to have the ability where a presentation can be exported to a PPT or PDF file before too long (the PPT export will happen first). In addition Mitch wants the presentation creator to have the ability to send a presentation to a printer and have it printed and bounds - all from within SlideRocket.

Plug-In API and Salesforce Integration

Perhaps the coolest thing about SlideRocket is its extensibility. There is an entire plug-in API that is being created alongside the full featured authoring environment. Ideally, if developers want to integrate other data, they will have the power through this API to do so.

One great example of data integration that we will see soon is the integration with Salesforce.com data. This has been discussed a few different places on the Internet, and it certainly expands on what has been thought possible with presentation software. This would allow a presentation to contain real time data display synced through Salesforce.com.

Design and Scalability

Mitch and I ended our talk with a bit of an insight into the backend for SlideRocket. The SlideRocket methodology for scalability was a little different than I expected. Much of the work is handled by the client - so that the back-end resources don't have to be huge. In most cases this could result in a very slow Flex application - but I feel that SlideRocket is pretty responsive (there are certainly some areas that could be improved - but after all, SlideRocket is still in beta). Mitch blew me away when he told me that even with all of the private beta users they have now, they are able to run most everything off of a single server.

What's Coming Up

Mitch informed me that a public beta is coming soon - probably mid summer. Also, he said that we can expect a 1.0 release sometime this fall.

Invites

Mitch was kind enough to give me a lot of invites - but there is a limit. You can get yours here while they are available.

Thanks

I want to thank Mitch Grasso for giving me the time to chat with him about SlideRocket as well as Nat Robinson for getting everything coordinated. Thanks guys!

Read more from David Tucker.