Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint

» see microsoft.com/office/producer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

producer was the kind of tool the e-learning industry used, i was not in the e-learning industry. by the time the october 2003 final shipped i was a university student in turkey on a dial-up account that paid by the minute (roughly). recording a webcam track over a deck of slides and uploading it as a streaming web page was a use case for a corporate trainer or a university lecturer with a t1 line. it was not a use case for anyone whose modem cost ten kurus a minute.

the product itself was a free add-in that microsoft handed out as a separate download alongside office. you ran a wizard that imported your powerpoint deck and recorded a webcam video plus microphone narration, then dropped slide-change markers on the resulting timeline. the output was a small website with a windows media player frame next to a clickable slide thumbnail strip. teachers loved that part. it dropped onto an intranet share or a school server and any pc on the lan with internet explorer could play it back.

anyway, the audience here was real. though, it was narrow. corporate trainers at fortune 500 firms and distance-learning programs at us universities. some sales engineers also used it to send four-minute pitches by email. that was the producer crowd. consumer-windows users mostly never heard of it because there was no shelf box and no reason to install it unless you already had a webcam plus a usb microphone on top of an existing powerpoint workflow.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it did ~

the technical trick was the synchronization timeline. you imported a powerpoint file and recorded a long audio or video track, then dragged slide-change markers onto the timeline to match what you were saying. producer published the whole thing as a folder containing an htm shell, a series of jpg slide thumbnails alongside a windows media stream. the htm shell ran a script that drove the slide changes from the video timecode.

the output format was effectively windows-only and internet-explorer-only because the playback ui was written in jscript and depended on the windows media player active-x control. honestly, anyone who opened the resulting page in netscape 7 or early firefox got a broken player frame and a slide deck that did not advance. that was already a problem in 2003 and a bigger problem by 2006.

~ what really happened ~

this part you had to be a corporate it admin to even notice, and i was not. microsoft never shipped a producer version for powerpoint 2007 or 2010, but the 2003 build kept installing and working against those newer office versions because the integration was loose. for a few years the recommended path on microsoft.com was just "use producer 2003 with your newer powerpoint and ignore the version warning". by around 2011 the download link itself stopped resolving and the product page rolled off the microsoft.com tree. no announcement, no replacement, no migration guide.

~ the long tail ~

the workflow producer had pioneered (slide deck plus webcam plus narration, exported as a self-contained playback bundle) did not die. it migrated to camtasia and to articulate storyline and to powerpoint's own built-in record-narration feature, which by office 2013 finally absorbed the basic idea. anyway, the active-x windows media player part is what truly killed producer. the moment internet explorer stopped being the default browser on the planet, the output files producer had been generating for nine years became unplayable on the typical 2014 laptop. installers of the october 2003 setup still float around the internet archive, the playback pages they generate are now museum pieces.

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