A Presentation Management System for Collaborative Meetings

Electronic presentations are rapidly becoming the standard for meetings in large high energy physics collaborations. An attractive solution should combine a central repository of presentation files with easy uploading and downloading access over the wide area network. This allows all information to be instantly shared within the collaboration, including remote participants at meetings. An ideal system should allow operation of a whole session from a single PC, without time-consuming switchovers between personal notebooks, and preserve the information for summary talks etc. On the other hand, there should be no need for manual collection of documents, and submission of slides should be possible even seconds before the presentation. We present a system developed and currently used by the ZEUS experiment at DESY. It provides a wide range of functions including registration of participants, automatic agenda preparation, presentation submission, display and archiving. A particular emphasis has been put on system security, with access to the system being made via a secure web interface. Different privilege levels are available within the system, according to the status of the user: chairman, speaker or other meeting participant. We also discuss our experience of using this system in a range of different contexts.