SlideSource: New Year, New Features – Part 1

In January, SlideSource celebrated its third birthday and added two thousand new users to our rapidly expanding community. Our continued growth as the industry’s best slide management system is largely due to the fact that we listen carefully to our users and continually innovate based on what they tell us.

As part of this innovation process, we are currently deploying several new features, functions, and improvements that make it even easier to take control of your slides and presentations. In part one of this two-part series, we will be looking at features that help you find and organize your slides (be sure to check out the screen capture gallery at the end of this article for additional details).

— — — — —

Using SlideSource to manage your presentation content means that all of your slides and presentations are finally located in one place. You no longer have to guess which PowerPoint file, in which folder on what USB drive, computer, or cloud server has the slide you are looking for. Equally important, each slide now has useful metadata attached to it. This metadata includes information like who edited a slide most recently and when those changes were made, as well as things like user generated comments and tags. Combining this with the built-in search function makes finding, managing, and actually using all of your organization’s slides much more efficient.

Enhanced Search Options

From the beginning, the SlideSource search function has been powerful — letting users search specifically in the slide title, text, or notes content as well as in the editor and tags metadata fields.  With the enhancements recently released, users can now search all metadata fields including any custom fields created by the user.

Unlimited Custom Metadata Fields

Users can now add as many custom fields as they want to the metadata attached to each of their slides. Available metadata field types include one line text, multi-line rich text, date/time, and drop down list.

This is a very powerful feature that can be used in many ways. For example, you may want to have a field tracking the source of the information on the slide, or the type of content on the slide, or the date when the information presented becomes invalid, or even the slide’s intended audience. A slide in a PowerPoint file is just a slide, but a slide with your custom metadata attached becomes a valuable asset to your organization.

Improved Search Tag Management

The SlideSource search tag is a special kind of metadata specially designed to be added to slides very quickly. Our recent update makes it even easier to find all the slides and presentations in a library that have been assigned a particular search tag and the tag management interface has been improved to make it easy to rename tags across all of the slides in the library.

For instance, you want to be able to easily track down a number of slides that you feel are important and give them the search tag “IMPORTANT.” However, a co-worker feels the slides are actually crucial and insists that the tag be changed. Renaming the “IMPORTANT”tag to “CRUCIAL” on the tag management page will then update all of the slides with the new tag without having to go to each slide and making the change manually.

Custom Stamps

One of Slide Source’s most unique and features has been the ability to “stamp” slides with a watermark indicating the slide’s owner within the organization as well as its current status in the approval process. Our recent update has expanded this capability so that users can now create custom stamps that appear either on their slides or off to the side of the slide. These stamps are added to the slides when they are downloaded. Users can pick the font, font size, color and location of the stamp. The stamps can be used to display things like approved use information, quality control review status, unique ID numbers or even global confidentiality messages without having to open and edit every single slide.

In the next post, we will review new features that will help you to keep track of what’s going on with your slides and presentations which is very important when you are working in a hectic, collaborative environment.

If you aren’t already a SlideSource.com user, now is a great time to sign up for a free account and give it a try. The free subscription has all of the features and capabilities of the paid subscription levels so you will be able to see exactly what makes SlideSource.com the most innovative and useful presentation management system available.

Click on image to enlarge.

Prev

1of7

Next