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SlideSource: New Year, New Features – Part 2

Lee Potts

In part one of this series, we introduced readers to new features and improvements to SlideSource that help users find and organize their slides so that presentation creation and maintenance takes less time and requires fewer resources. In this post we will look at another set of recently deployed features and improvements that will help users stay informed about what’s happening with the slides and presentations in their libraries. These oversight tools can be very important when working in hectic collaborative environments. A screen capture gallery at the end of this article will provide additional details and give you a chance to see these innovative slide management capabilities in action.

Library Activity Reporting

This feature lets you and your team see the big picture whenever you need to. Clicking a link on the Library Management page creates an up-to-the-minute report that details:

  • The most recently edited slides and presentations along with the editor and the date the edits were made
  • The users who have accessed the library
  • How often each presentation has been downloaded
  • How many slides have been downloaded by each user

There is also an overview report providing a breakdown by week of the:

  • Number of slides uploaded
  • Number of slides edited
  • Number of users who have logged in
  • Number of users who have downloaded slides

This information is provided in a standard Excel workbook, so it can be easily shared and integrated into other documents and reports.

Slide Collection Change Alerts

The action subscription feature sends alerts detailing changes made to any slide in a slide collection. Users can subscribe to a daily summary of all changes. Users can also subscribe to immediate alerts that will be sent when changes they specified are made. These include:

  • Slides are edited
  • Slides are added to the library
  • Slide versions are approved or rejected
  • Slide properties are edited
  • Slides are pending approval
  • Items in folders are reorganized
  • Items are deleted
  • Deleted items are restored
  • Actions are undone or redone
  • Comments are posted

The user can subscribe to alerts for just one, or any number of these immediate alerts.

Slide and Presentation Change Alerts

Slide and presentations action subscriptions offer the same sort of alerts except they are focused on individual slides and presentations rather than on entire slide collections. This feature is useful when there is a slide or presentation that requires a more intense level of monitoring. And as with the slide collection alerts, users can receive a daily digest of all changes as well as instant alerts for the types of changes that they specify.

If you aren’t already a SlideSource user, now is a great time to sign up for a free account and give it a test drive. 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 the most innovative and useful presentation management system available.

Click on image to enlarge.

Category: New Feature, SlideSource.com | Leave a comment

SlideSource: New Year, New Features – Part 1

Lee Potts

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).

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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.

Category: New Feature, SlideSource.com | Leave a comment

New SlideSource Feature: Duplicate Slide Search

Lee Potts

“Every Slide Counts” isn’t just a marketing slogan for us. Our goal is to make the process of managing your PowerPoint slide and presentation content as easy and efficient as possible… so you can squeeze every bit of value from these important assets. This means we never stop looking for ways to make SlideSource.com even better. Recently, we released a number of new and improved features that do exactly that. Each of these new features were specifically requested by users within the last six months. The first new feature we’ll look at is the Duplicate Slide Search Function.

One of the advantages of using SlideSource.com is that you only need one copy of any given slide in your slide library. That slide can then be used across multiple presentations within SlideSource.com. This means you only need to update one slide… in one place (the slide library) to automatically update all the presentations that contain it. Without SlideSource, you would need to track down the slide in each individual presentation on your hard drive, your colleagues’ hard drives, and your company’s server in order to open and update each one manually.

When customers started loading all of their presentation content into SlideSource, they found that they had many copies of the same slide uploaded because they were duplicated in presentation after presentation. The good news is SlideSource.com users can now easily track down and eliminate all of the duplicate versions they have accumulated and replace the versions they don’t want with the version they do want in every presentation it appears in. Here’s what the process looks like.

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Step 1: Select your search criteria and designate a Primary Slide.

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Step 2: Review duplicates and either ignore them, delete them or merge them into the version that you designated to be the Primary Slide.

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That’s it, you’re done!

De-duplicating your slides makes you and your team more efficient and this new feature makes the process as simple, quick, and easy as our users have come to expect from SlideSource. 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. If you are already a subscriber, be sure to give this new feature a try soon. And in either case, please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Category: How-tos, New Feature, SlideSource.com | Leave a comment