Engaging, Syndicated Content Collections

Sometimes providing someone with a simple list of choices is not effective because they'll find it boring. Users may have been spoiled by the newer, more immersive online experiences. You need to create a more engaging experience.

At other times you want to package up content you have in source or original repository and provide it to users through some other website, wiki or blog.

These two scenarios are common ones that the OpenText Widget Services (OTWS) solution was designed to address. It also gives control of where the content is used, and more importantly, you don't have to renounce ownership rights based on an agreement with service provider.

A small code snippet is created to be embedded anywhere - much as users have learned for videos with YouTube (and Open Text Video Services) and  presentations with SlideShare. But OTWS supports many formats of content, even in one collection assembled from more than one repository if required. In some ways it is like a dynamic, immersive portal.

There's nothing like an example, so here is a collection of four keynote presentations given at last year's Content World 2010 - the OpenText global users' conference. The original files happen to be in PDF converted from PowerPoint, but a wide variety of formats are supported by OTWS as I mentioned. There are a number of different style widget templates - I picked a simple one here.





If you've never seen this before, here are a few instructions:

For the Player

1. Scroll through the presentation collection using the arrow tabs on the left and right of the player frame
2. You can go to full screen mode in the widget through the icon on the lower right of the player. Frankly it's much better when you do that as I only put a small player here
3. Also on the lower right is a share icon (two heads) to download the embed code to be used elsewhere

For a Presentation in the Player

1. If you click on a presentation you can open it in your browser
• There are then controls on the bottom to advance slides/pages, as well as to change the size and fit on your screen
2. You can download a specific presentation by clicking on the 'down-arrow' icon
3. You can see metadata of that presentation by clicking on the 'circling arrow' icon at the top left of the initial view

Next week there will be another Content World event. I'll be providing presentations from that event through widgets to supplement the traditional channel OpenText has provided. I'll use another widget template as well as a thumbnail feature to provide more easily read slide titles.

The player here is based on Flash, but HTML5 is supported in the OTWS version to be released in a few weeks.