Comparison

How does Live Presentations stack up against Google Docs (Presently)?

	Google Presentations	Live Presentations
Authoring functionality	Google's take on Office seems to suggest that "less is more" - provide just a sliver of functionality vis.a.vis Microsoft Office but the tepid response to Google Docs indicates that this is not quite what users wants. Specifically with respect to presentations, Google Docs is anemic in terms of features - no place for animations, slide transitions, sophisticated shapes etc and what's more if you import or export to/from PowerPoint, there is a large fidelity loss.	Live Presentations gives you all the features that you are used to in PowerPoint and extends it a lot further.
Access	This is probably the only true value of Google Docs - access your documents from anywhere. But what if you don't have access to the Internet or your browser is unsupported? Then you are out of luck!	With Live Presentations your presentations are accessible anywhere. View and edit online from any major browser on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or Redhat Linux or download the Live Presentations software version on your desktop and save your files locally so that you can view, edit or present even when you are offline.
Privacy and confidentiality	Have you read the Google Docs privacy policy and terms of service? If so, you probably know that Google has the right to go through your document content - remember that Google's aim is to "organize the world's information"...so what if the information in your documents is private or confidential - Google doesn't let a small thing like that stop them from snooping into your documents!	All documents created on Live Presentations are stored on Amazon S3 by default- only when they are in use does the Live Presentations server save a local temporary copy. At no point of time, does the Live Presentations server ever parse document contents for any nefarious reasons. If you are particularly concerned about document security and privacy, then you have the option to purchase a Live Documents server and host it internally within your enterprise. Contact us at sales@instacoll.com for more information on this option.
Collaboration and Version control	Google Presentations has in-built version control - each time you or a person with whom you have shared a presentation click on the save button, a new version is created. While this might sound like a good idea in theory, in practice it creates more problems than it solves. While users no longer have to email updated versions of documents to each other, the fact that there are now potentially dozens of versions of a single presentation means that it is almost impossible to figure out what changed what at any point of time. Try merging changes made by multiple people into a single version and you will see how difficult true actionable collaboration is within Google Docs.	Live Presentations saves versions at a slide level to enable painless triage for answering the question "who changed what when". Multiple people can edit a presentation simultaneously without any conflicts as only updates made to a slide are granularly tracked and merged in real-time.
Value	Google Docs is free - in this case, given the quality of the product, we believe that it is a case of getting what you paid for! That apart, are you okay with those pesky advertisements that appear next to your documents on which Google makes money? Also, keep in mind that these advertisements are contextually served on the basis of your presentation content meaning that Google is actively snooping into your documents - guess they never heard of privacy!	Live Presentations is available both as a free version as well as an inexpensive premium version - there is no difference in the features available for these versions. The premium version offers higher document count and storage space limits.