Some Presentation Tools

Microsoft PowerPoint

Single environment for creating presentation parameters.  The tool is geared towards ease of content creation, however the closed file format limits us from doing too much outside of the application.

Macromedia Director

Director is a cross-platform animation and authoring program.  It can create 3D media, interactive product demonstrations, and online learning applications for the Web, CD, DVD and corporate intranets. The presentation can be published to the Web and viewed via Shockwave Player.

It is developed for both the MacOS (Apple's Macintosh operating system) and MS-DOS/Windows/Win95 (Microsoft operating system and related applications). Projects created on one platform can be run on the other, but you must purchase and install two versions on the two platforms.  Again, we would prefer to have less restrictive platform.
 

Pure HTML

Most flexible option, but also requires more effort.  This is an open standard, so creation of a presentation is based on how a browser will interpret the presentation.  A custom solution can be coded - the Growing Book for example.  This also allows for a system of content submission and management to be coded as well.  As I'll be discussing, a web portal provides a good example for presentation of HTML based media.