Gates to Unveil Producer in COMDEX Opening

Bill Gates will draw on the spotlight of tonight's opening keynote address at COMDEX FALL 2001 to illuminate a new digital media authoring tool for PowerPoint 2002, dubbed Microsoft Producer. Aimed at the everyday user without proficient authoring skills, Producer unifies and synchronizes audio, video, slides, and images into rich media content through a wizard based tool. Presentations can be viewed across the Internet through a Web browser, over networks, or on CDs.

BetaNews was given an early look at Producer in June when it was first demoed at Streaming Media West and subsequently made publicly available on the Web as a technology preview for Office XP users. Since its introduction, corporate customers such as Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Marathon Oil, Mellon Financial Corporation, PPG Industries, RadioShack Canada and Unisys have adopted the solution. Gates is expected to showcase these companies during tonight's address.

Microsoft's corporate clientele and end-users are not the only groups that will be targeted with this release. Producer includes an SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows developers, independent software developers, network administrators, and systems integrators to create custom solutions.

"Businesses around the world are looking for new, more effective ways to communicate both internally and externally," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Business Productivity Group at Microsoft. "Microsoft Producer will do the same thing for digital media that FrontPage did for Web authoring: - Make it easier and more ubiquitous in companywide communication."

Weber Shandwick Worldwide -- one of Microsoft's PR agencies -- informed the press of independent analysis by Lawrence Orans, senior analyst at Gartner Inc. Orans has predicted that by 2006, 85 percent of enterprises using video-over-IP for corporate training will realize a positive return on investment in less than one year."

A free
download for Office XP users will begin tonight. Producer will not function with any previous version of Office. The initial release will be exclusively in English with French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish language versions set for a December release.