Re: collecting user information

In article <1133132078.480400.138400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Lorraine
wrote:
> When you mention "when they quit" do you mean when they log out? What
> exactly would drive the data collection to the file and the FTP after
> quiting?

I meant when they quit the presentation or reach the end, possibly triggered by
a macro; the same macro could write a file and send it to your server.

> My original solution was to save the presentations as web pages or
> archive (*.mht i believe) and when the user selects it from our
> website, open the presentation in a pop-up window and basically poll
> that child window to generally track how long the user is "viewing" the
> presentation. There really isn't much we can do to be sure they are
> actually paying attention to the presentation or if they close the
> parent window...

Perhaps there is. PowerPoint's own HTML probably won't help, since it'd appear
to be a constant named window, I expect (all the changes occur within frames).
But what if each slide were a different HTML page with a different title? We
have an addin that lets you convert the presentation like that (have a look at
http://ppt2html.pptools.com)

> But I've heard of people running executables to do similar training and
> those executables hold the means of tracking the users back in the
> server. So I've been thinking about ways of making our training
> presentations more "portable" through background events and downloading
> the slides to their own computer.

Visit http://skp.mvps.org - Shyam's posted some example code that demonstrates
how you can "host" a presentation on a VB form. That might give you a great
deal more control over what the users do.

> Our presentations already have macros that users must allow in order to
> view associated video content so it is not huge limiting factor --
> we'll warn them.
>
> But again is it possible to do something similar to this without
> revealing our connection information -- perhaps not through VBA as you
> said password protection is faulting,

Just to be clear ... *ALL* password protection is faulty. I haven't heard of a
method that isn't susceptible to enough time and computing resources. It's
more a question of how fully you need to protect this.

> but maybe an executable or
> opening IE to an asp page? Should I just stick with the child-window
> polling idea? Or are there other free technologies better suited for
> this type of task? Macromedia presenation solution instead of
> Powerpoint? (Not too familiar with macromedia though although whatever
> it is that google video uses is rather interesting...)
>
> Thanks
> Lorraine
>

-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
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