A recent story from the Financial Post made it official.  More than 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies are either using or testing the iPad.  IT departments everywhere are trying to give their organizations an edge by putting tablets in the hands of sales teams, but Apple’s own presentation software Keynote just isn’t making the cut.  Here’s why.

You, like many, may have switched to Keynote in an attempt to gain an aesthetic edge over the rest of your competing corporate storytellers.  If you’re part of one of the many companies that does business on PCs though, you already know that the transition to Keynote may be partially in vain.

Of course Keynote looks great from a design perspective, but pushing sales presentations over to Powerpoint presents more than a few issues.  Keynote files are too bulky to email, videos don’t transfer, Keynote doesn’t play on the web, and some Keynote templates are completely error ridden when they make the switch to Powerpoint.  The challenges are endless, and Keynote just isn’t portable.  It might be a good solution if you’re one person with one Mac, but if you’re managing an entire sales team, forget about it.

Remember that bulky Keynote file we talked about before?  It’s still a factor that’s making it almost impossible to transfer that killer presentation to the iPad when the time comes.  Of course you could try to email a 500MB file to yourself, but if you’ve been in business long enough you know that even the early Palm Pilots only held 8MB total and most email services still don’t transfer files that big.  The only other option is syncing your iPad with iTunes, but when we’re talking entire sales teams this is close to impossible.

Even after you’ve managed to make the transfer you have to retrieve the video manually and hope that all the data sets are correct right on down to every last word.  After all, making a change means going through the entire process over again.

So what’s the answer for presentation management on the iPad?  Where are the IT and sales teams for those 80 Fortune 100 companies going to turn?  Some will stick with the process, never knowing that they can update their data sets automatically without recreating entire presentations.  Others have yet to find us, but the innovators who are already here know.  CustomShow was built for the kind of on the run portability that keeps business ahead of the curve.  If you want to give it a try we’re ready.