Producer for PowerPoint: Now Official!

It's a pleasure to announce the official release of a great tool for working with PowerPoint files, Microsoft Producer.

Microsoft Producer allows you to take an existing presentation file, capture and synchronize video and audio narration, add additional media content, and produce a unified set of content ready for viewing in a browser on your corporate intranet or a generally accessible web server.

A powerful tool for e-learning, corporate communications, sales... many corporations and schools have been using Producer on a regular basis for many years.

What’s been going on?

The previous version of Producer had a few bugs, needed some adjustments to make it work with the new Office 2007 version of PowerPoint, and we needed to fix a couple of incompatibilities with current browsers.

A beta with fixes to the biggest problems was released, allowing many users to continue to use Producer with Office 2003 and Office 2007. However, we knew the long term fix was to make sure Producer would work with PowerPoint 2010 and make it available via the official Microsoft Downloads site. So for the last few months we have been working towards that goal. A small group of PowerPoint developers, testers, and program managers made sure that the product would work with the last three releases of PowerPoint.

We're happy to say that today, right now, you can download that official release of Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint!  (Yes, as you can see in the earlier picture, for simplicity’s sake we’ve dropped the year from the name of the product.)

For those not already familiar with the previous versions, you can use Producer to capture video, audio, and still images from a Web camera, a video camera  (digital or analog), or from your computer screen. You can then use that captured content in your Producer presentations. You can also use Producer to import existing Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Windows Media files, still images, and HTML files, and then synchronize narrations with your video and PowerPoint presentations. You can then publish the presentation to an e-service provider, to a corporate intranet site, on a corporate network, or to the Web.

One more reminder

This new version of Producer is a compatibility upgrade and there aren't any new features. Yes we’ve listened to your requests during the Beta, but updating the function of Producer wasn’t in our goals.  Of course we can’t comment on unannounced future products, Producer or PowerPoint, but customer feedback like this is a big factor in planning upcoming releases.

And it's free!

One final note to all the folks who have written or asked after the fate of Producer over the last few months.  Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.  We have a standard policy with respect to pre-announcing products, for the most part we won't discuss products under development. Please remember that even though we don't make a lot of comments about future releases, we're always listening.  And working.

-Ric

Ric Bretschneider
May 9, 2010

Want the new Producer? You can download it here.

Note that if your computer has never had Office 2007 or earlier installed, you’ll need to manually install the Office Animation Runtime component, as it is not installed with Office 2010.  You can download that from here.

Additional information, training and sample projects are available here.