Mimeo and SlideRocket: Printing In The Cloud

A great example of Rich Internet Printing is the collaboration between my company, Mimeo.com, and SlideRocket. In this case, our two companies had to work together to invent a way that Sliderocket presentations could be professionally printed by Mimeo. SlideRocket is part of this new generation of RIAs. It is a Web 2.0 online presentation application that allows users to produce slideshows that have some advantages over creating presentations in desktop applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. SlideRocket runs in a web browser, instead of requiring the installation of software on your computer. It features collaboration tools that let users share slides and other assets (like graphics and movies) between presentations. Because the application is Internet-based, these users can be geographically dispersed and still share nicely. This collaboration, and user-generated content sharing, is what makes SlideRocket a unique and powerful Web 2.0 application. The company recently announced that Chuck Dietrich, former VP GM at Salesforce.com, joined the company as CEO, see the TechCrunch article here.

The SlideRocket relationship with Mimeo involved the use of the MimeoConnect SOAP API technology. This is a set of Web Services that let partners submit files, define product intent, get quotes and proofs, and submit orders, recipient addresses, shipping methods and payments. This technology solves the problem of delivering content files and placing orders; primarily the communication between our two applications in the cloud (i.e., cloud to cloud).

With that connectivity in hand, we then needed to solve how SlideRocket would take their rich content (screen-based Flash presentations) and turn it into PDF files to send to Mimeo (this was a Mimeo requirement, due to our automated PDF-based production workflow). Finally, we needed to create a way to let the non-technical SlideRocket user to specify the product intent to communicate to Mimeo for manufacturing.

To solve the former problem, SlideRocket created a server-based application that “printed” the “slide deck” to a PDF file. To solve the latter problem, Mimeo created a special interface designed to reside within the SlideRocket Flash application. When the user chooses “Print” from the SlideRocket menu, they can either choose to print on their local printer, or print “high quality with finishing options” via Mimeo.

The interface we built incorporates a subset of Mimeo’s new photo-realistic document viewer. We call it MimeoProof, because it is about as close as one can get to holding a print product in their hands by viewing it as an image on the screen. The Sliderocket version lets the user see their presentation, visually depicting paper stocks, covers and binding choices. This is an important part of helping the non-technical user specify product intent, it gives them the confidence they need to proceed with the order.

Once the user places their order on the SlideRocket site, e-commerce and print-specific transactions flow: we are sent a PDF file containing the slides, and an XML transaction containing the order information (desired quantity of books, destination, shipping method, etc.) The next day, or at some point in the near future depending on the user’s choice, a beautiful bound version of the Sliderocket slides shows up on the user’s doorstep in whatever quantity they specified.