Presentations in Google Docs

Yesterday the Google Docs team released Presentations as part of Google Docs. I'm really excited about this launch. As a manager at Google, I end up doing my fair share of presentations. The twist is that these are almost always collaborative presentations. In a recent example I needed to do a project status presentation to a group. I wanted each of the engineers and the product manager to have a chance to speak to the group. So,we used the Presentation feature of Google Docs. To get this to work, I created an basic outline with a slide for each person and some suggestions for what they talk about. Then I shared the link with everyone on the team and asked them to start putting together their individual slides. Since the application shows changes immediately, I could leave a window open watching the presentation go together. As people added stuff, I could chat with them about their slides and how the transitions would work. When it came time to preset, it didn't matter whose laptop we used since the authoritative version of the presentation was on the web. So, we sent the URL for the presentation to the last guy who presented, and we were up and running. Finally, when it came time to distribute our notes, we just marked the presentation as viewable by anyone at Google, sent the URL out to the team, and included a link in the notes blog. Next year at GTAC, we'll be using Google Docs to put together the lightning talks, so that the job of collecting all the slides ahead of time is dead easy.