I am working for a large government organization, where we have been using Power

Question

I am working for a large government organization, where we have been using Powerpoint as the backbone of our training material development. However we are thinking about migrating to a new platform for a number of reasons

Powerpoint technologically is "stale" and uncompelling compared to alternatives.
We'd like to migrate to a tool that runs through the web browser and that uses more open standards/source
Would like to be able to open a presentation at different points. Previous to pptx / Office 2010, you could open a powerpoint to a given slide. But this feature doesn't work anymore

Feature Requirements (top 3 features)

Access to any / all parts of presentation via URL controls (ie using '?' or ':' in the url) in IE 8
"Instant" Access: The staff that would be using this is under tremendous time pressure. We have low bandwidth, so a tool with less frills and smaller file sizes / time to start up is preferred.
Web development or "Single file" deployment: If possible, tools like Presi (inaccessible currently do to technology constraints) or single file formats like .ppsx are preferable to having an archive of files.
NOT NEEDED: Interactivity is rather low on the list. The system is intended to be simple, focusing on procedural instructions with a screen shot of two

Concerns

There is a lot(!) of technical information that our trainees need to learn and be able to recall. Ideally, training material would also serve as a user manual for forgotten concepts.
We already have a sizeable trove of powerpoint training material, which ideally we'd like to be able to migrate
Our technology platform is well behind the current state-of-the-art (OS: MS-XP, IE 8, Adobe AIR from 2005 - 8), and because of the size of our organization, platform upgrades are difficult and expensive. Also, I have been pushing our MIS team for upgrades of these platforms for a year, without any success.

The platform issue is a serious issue, and will take some real effeort to resolve. However I see the biggest issue is with migrating old training material. So any advice on these two issues would be very welcome.

Explanation / Answer

Given your ideals of single file deployment and the ability to use the training material as reference I would strongly suggest converting the existing material to and generating new material as ebooks.

A first look for converting your existing files:

ppt -> OpenOffice Impress -> HTML -> Calibre -> ebook format.

The ebooks will normally be:

Single file
Readable on a wide variety of devices including older machines
Able to be downloaded and retained for reference.
All of the above software is free
All of the above software is cross platform
All of it is scriptable so you should be able to automate the process, (for at least a first pass conversion).
The middle step - the HTML collection - can be viewed on web browsers including the ability jump to specific locations.
If you set up a suitable template you could include links to download the ebook version(s)
Calibre can be set as a server allowing the training material to be browsed by category and downloaded, with device specific conversion.

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