Day 6 – Doing more with slides

Today we’ll look at how you can manage your slides in PMA.core, and practice safe security practices with PMA.slidebox.

We present a complete workflow from slide acquisition to publication.

Let’s start at the beginning (a very good place to start): Assume that you are an instructor at a university and you have obtained a number of cases that you want to present to our students.

As we stated before: Pathomation offers a comprehensive software platform. This means that different steps in any particular workflow are best handled by their respective components. The workflow presented today involves the following components:

These cases were provided to you by a colleague and are currently sitting on a memory key (or an external hard disk).

After you inspect the slides on the memory key with PMA.start, the next step for distributing the slides to your students is to upload them onto PMA.core, using PMA.transfer.

Transferring slides

Within an organizational context, you can load content onto PMA.core by dragging your local slides to a network share, but for your sandbox setup you don’t have this, so go ahead and launch PMA.transfer.

Upon connecting to your sandbox from within PMA.transfer, you see the root-directories available to you.

Your personal folder already contains some slides (perhaps from our day 3 tutorial). Because you want to keep the slides for your students’ midterm separate, you want to create a new folder.

Click on the “Add new folder” button to make a new folder.

Fill out the name of the new folder.

Note: you cannot create new root-directories via PMA.transfer. You need to be inside a root-directory to create new folders.

Go into the new folder that you created.

Now you can transfer your slides from the external hard disk to their target location. You can do this via the context-menu that comes with each slide, or via drag and drop. After each slide is transferred, a dialog pops up that confirms that the transfer of each slide was complete.

After transferring all slides, your screen should look like this:

You can log into PMA.core to confirm all the slides are there, too:

The slides are now available in your PMA.core sandbox, and you could already share them one by one with your students through PMA.view.

Setting up PMA.slidebox

Now that you have the slides in PMA.core, it’s time to point PMA.slidebox in the right direction.

You already looked at the default cases that we provide you with in PMA.slidebox on day 4 of our tutorial series.

This time, choose for the setup option instead of the end-user viewing option:

You see a screen that looks like this:

Don’t worry about the Website configuration section. It is already pre-configured for you when we setup the sandbox environment for you. We’ll come back to it later.

Collections is what we’re all about at present!

The different “Speaker …” checkboxes indicate how many collections you want in your slidebox. We’re only preparing our students’ midterm for the time being, so keep “Speaker 1” checked In our example, and see if you see the root-directory that you transferred the slides into as part of the Collection folder dropdown.

In our case, we don’t see the “Yves” folder appear. Why is that?

Access Control Lists (ACL) in PMA.core

Why aren’t you seeing all root-directories in the dropdown?

The reason is that the stipulated account is a different type of account than your own: you can see your root-directories (of course), but the specified “zagreb” account can’t.

You could solve this problem two ways:

• Have PMA.slidebox use your personal account credentials instead of the “zagreb” account
• Investigate the “zagreb” account in PMA.core and make sure that it has access to your uploaded slides.

As you may suspect, the second option is the preferred one. Remember the user management tutorial from day 5? Your personal account has the “Administrative” flag checked and can log in to PMA.core directly. The “zagreb” account, in contrast, can’t. It’s good security practice to use account credentials that allow one to access only what’s needed.

But then how do we go about giving “zagreb” access to our personal slides folder?

Log in to PMA.core as yourself. Go to user management, and look for the “zagreb” account:

Click on the account and navigate to the “ACL” tab. All root-directories are listed here, and the page should show that the “zagreb” account doesn’t have access to your personal root-directory:

Check the checkbox and press the “Save” button.

Then, go back to your PMA.slidebox configuration and refresh the page. The root-directory should now show:

Fill out the name of the folder that you created for your slides, too. Select a picture from your hard disk to make the collection easily recognizable. Uncheck the other speakers, and when your form looks somewhat like the following, save it:

After saving the configuration, you receive a confirmation message:

The final moment is there: go to the end-user interface of your sandboxed PMA.slidebox, and observe the result:

 

Click on any slide to see it in more detail:

Slides versus cases

We’re not quite happy with our presentation yet. Even the slides are named case1… case4, they’re shown as individual instead of grouped slides.

Remember that we told you in episode 4 that PMA.slidebox needs subfolders to be able to group slides together.

We can re-organize our slides either with PMA.transfer, or in PMA.core directly. Since we already explained how to make new (sub)folders in PMA.transfer, we’ll discuss the options in PMA.core now.

After logging into PMA.core, navigate to your folder, use the dropdown menu to create your first new subfolder:

Make as many new subfolders as you need. After you’re done with your directory structure, it’s time to move the slides to the right location. click on any slide, and then click on the “Move” button underneath the slide’s thumbnail.

A new interface will present itself that looks like this:

After moving all the slides to their correct destinations, there’s no extra work needed on the PMA.slidebox side of things! Just refresh the end-user’s page, and your grouped structure is automatically picked up by PMA.slidebox:

Where to from here?

If you have extra time to spare today, take some time to setup your own PMA.slidebox website with your own slide collections. Upload the slides via PMA.transfer, organize them in PMA.core, and finally publish them. Go ahead and impress your friends and colleagues with your work, too.

In tomorrow’s edition, we’ll start exploring PMA.studio, in which you can do everything you can’t in PMA.view. With PMA.studio, you can track slide metadata, make annotations, hold conferences, and much more.

If PMA.studio was not part of your sandbox installation, contact us so we can add it.