Presentation Tips for PowerPoint

Why Centralize Your Corporate PowerPoint Slide Library?

Posted on August 29, 2017August 29, 2017 by Rajiv Prasad

Corporations have accumulated thousands of PowerPoint slides across multiple departments with little or no organization. The slides are decentralized across the creator’s network folder and shared with only immediate colleagues. The corporation has no idea of how many slides exist across their organization. Furthermore, many of those slides may not be current or approved by management for compliance. In many cases, slide duplicates exist with multiple content creators. Most likely, your business struggles to manually make multiple slide updates across numerous presentation decks hosted on a file system. Then, upon update, it can easily disseminate updated slide decks across your organization.

Presentation Management System
Presentation Management System, with an intelligent slide library, provide tools for sharing approved PowerPoint slides across the enterprise to benefit your organization. Your centralized slide library boosts your team’s custom presentation-building productivity in many ways compared to using PowerPoint alone. You can search for slides by specific keyword to locate choice slides for your custom presentation. Your team always has access to the latest approved slides for use and reuse. Visual reports provide user activity history for building and downloading presentations and slides.

PowerPoint Slide Library
The slide library is a powerful tool for managing slide and presentation updates. A version control provides a visual history of replaced slides. Using the slide library advanced tool, the administrator can create custom presentations for teams’ use as full, topic-specific presentations. The administrators’ productivity is increased significantly because you are reusing approved slides. Working outside PowerPoint also increases productivity due to advanced features in a presentation management system.

As the Epoch Slide administrator, you build your PowerPoint slide library the way your organization is set up. You structure your PowerPoint slide library folder tree based on your team’s’ roles and provide the granular permission. A good slide library folder tree structure provides a great user experience, allowing users to easily drill down to the slides they need. For a powerful search ability, you tag slides with relevant keywords so users can easily find the correct slides.

Presentation Composer
Your executive and sales teams gain tremendous benefits from a centralized corporate PowerPoint Slide Library because they can build better presentations faster by using approved slides. You can search by keywords to find choice slides to use in your presentation. You re-use existing slides by searching, selecting, and arranging to compose a custom PowerPoint presentation faster than ever before.

You can save your custom-built PowerPoint presentation to use again or edit to create another version of a custom presentation. Once your presentation is complete, you can share with clients and prospects. You can gently remind them that your presentation expires in 48 hours, so they should act soon.

Automating PowerPoint Slide Library for Management Consulting Firms

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by Rajiv R. Prasad

Build and Update Workshop PowerPoint Decks Fast!

Today’s web tools and apps provide specialized technology for management consulting firms for managing their extensive PowerPoint slide libraries. Management consulting firms have accumulated hundreds of presentations decks encompassing thousands of PowerPoint slides. Every instructor or consultant relies on PowerPoint slides for their client training workshops.

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Management consulting firms cater to corporations of all sizes and use PowerPoint slides for effective communication while delivering their training workshops. A small management Consulting firm of five to fifteen employees has three to thirty-thousand slides. A specialized tool is required to manage those presentation slides while keeping them up to date.

Epoch Slide is a specialized tool for building your courseware faster than in PowerPoint alone. We worked with our client over the course of years, honing a tool for developing management consulting and training workshops. Search the Epoch Slide Library by keyword to find choice slides for creating your workshop courseware presentation. You have advanced features for reusing digital slides or a group of slides such as training modules for building your workshop presentation quickly.

“You reuse and assemble training modules to compose a custom workshop courseware faster than current methods available in PowerPoint.”

SharePoint, FTP, Drive, DropBox, and email are poor tools for managing thousands of slides because they are not designed as presentation management systems. Imagine you must update 50 new slides created in 2017 across one or two-hundred presentation decks with a library of three to six-thousand slides or more. You would copy the required individual or groups of slides, open the target file, and paste in each presentation deck. Then, repeat the same procedure hundreds of times, opening 100+ presentation decks, deleting old slides, and pasting the new slides in the correct order, multiple times. You’re not pasting all 50 slides at once in a deck; you must selectively update each deck. This manual process is extremely laborious and time consuming; it can easily take a week or more to complete. Even after the slide update procedure is complete, the distribution of the slide library throughout the organization is inadequate for quickly creating custom courseware.

Now, imagine that Epoch Slide Presentation Management System, with an intelligent slide library, has automated this slide update process to save up to 80% of the required time for the same task. By uploading and replacing the original instance of the updated slide, all copies of this slide are updated across multiple decks instantly and made available to users. Furthermore, the process to create a custom presentation for each opportunity is improved significantly by creating better PowerPoint decks faster.

Using your firm’s slide library, you create a custom presentation in hours as compared to days or even weeks with PowerPoint alone. This is realized because you have access to the entire slide library of approved and final content. You can search the slide library by keyword to find choice slides, assemble the slides in the desired order, and download them to deliver your workshop courseware.

Here are eleven benefits for a Management Consulting Firm by automating PowerPoint slide management process.

Centralize the PowerPoint slide library
Update slides instantly across multiple decks
Eliminate workshop courseware administrative headaches
Gain an intelligent slide library with a powerful keyword search
Build better workshop presentations extremely fast
Reuse and assemble slides for a productivity factor
Use a desktop, laptop, or iPad app to create a custom presentation
Share your presentation link with your prospects and clients for free
Protect your brand by locking slides
Embed videos and animation to improve messaging
Compose modules to create courseware faster than with PowerPoint alone

Presentation management systems increase your workshop courseware composition productivity in manifold ways. The Epoch Slide workflow process provides the tools to build custom courseware in record time, unmatched by any other system or process available in PowerPoint alone. The Epoch Slide presentation management system is simply a must-have “killer tool” for training and consulting firms looking for workshop courseware management.

PowerPoint Slide Library for Wealth Management Firms

Posted on July 7, 2017July 8, 2017 by Rajiv R. Prasad

Build Targeted PowerPoint Presentations Fast!

Asset and wealth management firms are finding difficulty keeping their PowerPoint presentations up to date for their executive and sales teams. Wealth management banks and financial asset management firms are using inadequate tools such as SharePoint, DropBox, or Google Drive to store and distribute their tools. Their tools are obsolete for presentation management because they are not designed for managing and distributing PowerPoint presentations and slides. The tools lack many other features available in a presentation management system.

A PowerPoint slide library is the core of a presentation management system. Banks and investment firms of all sizes have amassed thousands of slides over the years. The bad news is that these slides are scattered across outdated file systems. None of these systems are designed for presentation management, nor do any of them have a slide library.

You may feel that your PowerPoint presentation and slides are centralized for use by your organization. However, that is just one critical presentation management feature that you must address as the CEO, COO, VP of Marketing, or the presentation library administrator. As the PowerPoint library administrator, you must update slides on a regular basis and then distribute them to the entire organization. A single slide update replacement across fifty presentation decks may take one hour or more using PowerPoint. Certainly, opening and editing fifty presentations in PowerPoint will take longer than just one minute.

How much time does it take for you to update 25 or 50 slides across 100 presentation decks?

We all know that would take several days to a week’s worth of work. As the PowerPoint slide library administrator, you would benefit from a tool that can automate the slide update process and complete the same task in a fraction of the time. One client reported an 800% increase in efficiency because he did his slide update in five minutes using Epoch Slide as compared to 40 minutes with PowerPoint.

Here are some tips to help you organize you PowerPoint Slide Library. The Presentation Management System is either available as managed hosting software as a service (SaaS) or an enterprise license installed on your intranet network web server. Regardless of the platform you choose, you will need to upload your entire slide library in the Presentation Management System.

You can build your online library folder by folder and upload multiple presentations as required to build your online PowerPoint slide library. This can become time consuming if you have thousands of slides to upload and organize into a centralized slide library system with folders and subfolders. In most cases, the slide library is not organized locally, and the administrator tries to upload and organize as they learn to use the Presentation Management System. Given the upload requirements, the task time length increases accordingly while you build your library in real time and schedule.

The efficient way to build your PowerPoint Slide Library is on your desktop with all the folders and subfolders organized locally. Since you are not uploading, you can work faster to build your slide library. When you are done building your PowerPoint Slide Library, use the Epoch Slide Auto-Uploader tool to automatically upload your entire local slide library into the Epoch Slide Presentation Management System. The Auto-Uploader will automatically create all folders and sub-folders and upload presentations accordingly to replicate your slide library online. The Epoch Slide Auto-Uploader tool will save you a week or more in time as compared to doing the same process manually.

Your company may organize PowerPoint content as slides or presentations for use by various teams. Once your presentations are in the slide library, you now can optimize presentation meta properties and add keyword tags to slides. These meta tags and slide keywords are searchable, so users can find choice slides for their masterpieces. Epoch Slide Presentation Management System’s intelligent slide library has many advanced features that increase productivity. These advanced features let the administrator optimize the slide library by creating pre-built presentations for users very quickly.

Your teams have access to the latest approved slides and presentations for ease of customization to seize current opportunities. They can build better presentations faster than with their current method by using the company’s approved PowerPoint library. All slides are approved and up to date with content. They can search using keywords to find choice slides for building custom presentations faster than using PowerPoint alone.

Thousands of Corporate Slides Are Decentralized

Posted on May 30, 2017May 30, 2017 by Rajiv R. Prasad

Duplicates Slides Are Scattered with Limited Accessibility

A critical problem has emerged as the corporate PowerPoint slide library has grown over two plus decades. The assets include thousands of slides in hundreds of presentation decks. These thousands of slides are scattered on users’ computers or shared drives across the enterprise. Only the large corporations have SharePoint slide library, which is very inefficient when compared to today’s Presentation Management System. To make things worse, SharePoint is no longer supporting slide library as they move to Office 365.

Those corporations that do not have SharePoint store their slides in FTP, Shared Network Drive, DropBox, or GDrive, all of which are inefficient when compared to Presentation Management System’s Slide Library (or Libraries). Presentation System provides many functionaries for users to quickly search and find choice slides based on keywords and searchable content.

Corporations not using a Presentation Management System face the following painful inefficiencies:

The Problems

Slides are created by team members and are not centralized
Even if slides are centralized and stored in FTP, SharePoint, DropBox, or Google Drive, none of these platforms provide an effective access method since they lack the following:
- Keyword search
- Metadata search
- Notes search
- Slide content search

There is no presentation composer or builder for creating presentations.
- No slide selection or assembly
- No favorites
- No presentation preview
- No presentation share
- No slide with video playback preview

Slide updates manually across multiple decks are very time consuming
Version control is not in place, no there is no slide update history
Branding is diluted due to there being no master control
User possesses outdated slides
Duplicate slides are created across the enterprise
Slides are created by team members and not shared easily
Inefficient access to slides
Too slow to respond to new opportunities
Creating custom presentations with PowerPoint alone is time-consuming

Companies of all sizes rely on PowerPoint presentations for corporate teams such as the following:

Sales
Marketing
Directors
Training
Speaker Support
Scientific Liaison
Corporate Communication
Other executives who create two or more presentations per month.

Here, I will discuss the advantages of Presentation Management System with an intelligent slide library, a presentation composer, and all the benefits.

The Solution | Presentation Management

Intelligent Slide Library with a Powerful Presentation Composer

The solution is Presentation Management System with a smart slide library and a presentation composer for quickly assembling custom presentations. The slide library is the brains behind Presentation Management System. The presentation manager or Administrator builds the company’s slide library by creating folders and subfolders and then uploading full or starter presentations and slides for on-demand access by presentation composers and presenters.

The presentation administrators have many tools at their disposal to upload presentations and slides in the appropriately organized hierarchical library folder tree.

By searching a slide library, selecting choice slides, and assembling them for your opportunity, you can build better presentations faster than using your current method.

Advanced Slide Library

Once you have some or many of your presentations and slides uploaded, you may want to create custom presentations for your marketing, sales, and training teams. You create custom presentations for your teams using the advanced slide association feature. You can “associate” a shortcut instance of a slide in many presentation decks simply by using drag & drop.

A Boost in Productivity When Updating Slides

Slide updates comprise a very time-consuming part of the business process. I am told by our consulting and training client that he needed to update three slides in multiple decks. Using the traditional method in PowerPoint it would have taken him 40 minutes, but with Epoch Slide, it took only 5 minutes. That’s an 800% ROI by gaining productivity and saving time to do other tasks. Now, let’s increase our example to 30 slides, which is reasonable for mid-size and large enterprises. You must spend practically a day using “search & find” and updating the scattered decks. With Epoch Slide, you can accomplish the same task in less than an hour.

Build Better Presentations with Composer

You get access to a very friendly UI & UX experience in which you can create better presentations faster than using your current method. You can react quickly to every opportunity faster than your competitor. You can search, locate, select, and drag & drop choice slides in “Presentation Composer” window. There, you can reorder the slides as needed, add intro and ending slides, save custom presentations, and download a PPT or PPTX file to your laptop for delivery of your presentation.

Intuitive & Easy to Use

You can tag your frequently used slides as favorites and build your own mini library for reuse so they are easily available in your Favorite Folder for selection. Favorite slides help you build better presentations faster. Next time, you can create a new presentation using favorites and other slides.

You can rate slides from 1 to 5 to show how well you like each slide. An average is computed several times a day to reflect the rating for each popular slide.

Last but not least, you can open an existing presentation, customize it for new opportunities, and save it as a custom presentation. Download it onto your laptop or present directly from your Epoch Slide iPad App.

Epoch Presentation Composer™ for the CEO

Posted on April 18, 2017April 18, 2017 by Rajiv Prasad

They say PowerPoint makes it easy to build bad presentations with too many bullets and content, crowding the limited slide space.

CEOs have even less time than other employees to deliver a great presentation every time. So, how do they do it?

We know that there is a great team behind every CEO that brings their skills to the table. The company’s expertise is displayed on multiple slides; however, these PowerPoint slides are currently stored in antiquated formats such as SharePoint, FTP, online drive, and others. These are not designed for managing a PowerPoint slide library and have no presentation builder or composer capabilities. Therefore, it is difficult to find the right slides quickly.

Epoch Slide™ is an easy-to-use tool for composing better presentations faster. Once your team builds the company’s Slide Library with thousands of slides, you can use the Epoch Presentation Composer™ to search and find “final and approved” slides for immediate use. Develop a standard for managing your PowerPoint slide content, thus preserving your brand while maintaining compliance with version control “snapshots” for auditing.

By separating slide creation from presentation building, the CEO can compose better presentations faster than with PowerPoint alone. For nine years, we have been improving our tools, which are built from the ground up for CEOs and executives to leverage the slide libraries of their companies on-demand.

Use the powerful keyword search for finding and selecting choice slides; composing the introductory, middle, and ending content of your custom presentation; and answering the current opposition in style by creating and delivering superior presentations.

As the CEO, you are probably creating at least one presentation per month to realize the ROI of your presentation management subscription. Investor Pitch, Board Meeting Update, Company Vision Pitch, and Keynote are just a few types of the presentation software that will cross your desk this year.

Use the Epoch Slide™ intelligent slide library to organize and manage your PowerPoint slides and video content. Your administrator can upload and organize full PowerPoint presentations, groups of slides, or individual slides so you can access them quickly.
If you are not using a presentation management system or any other PowerPoint CMS, then you may not have a centralized library with an integrated presentation builder. As you can imagine, there are many benefits of an on-demand centralized slide library that delivers the latest approved content to the entire enterprise. With Epoch Slide™, you can create better presentations faster than with PowerPoint alone.

If you could create a custom presentation for every opportunity that comes along, would that increase the closing rate?

We are confident that it would increase not only your closing rate but your productivity as well. You can create presentations on your desktop, compose while mobile in a limo or at a coffee shop, and access your entire slide library along with the Presentation Composer™ from your iPad app.

The Epoch Presentation™ App for the iPad allow CEOs to work on their presentations while mobile. Synchronize before you leave, and you can work offline with complete access to your local slide library database from your iPad.
You owe it to yourself to test drive Epoch Slide™. Discover how much faster you—and your entire company—can build better presentations.

Sign up for a 30-day trial today.

Presentation Management Speedup Course Building

Posted on March 10, 2017March 10, 2017 by icpadmin

Presentation Builder for iPad — Leverage your company’s slide library in Epoch Slide™ presentation management system.

Businesses of all sizes are leveraging specialized technology to attain a competitive edge today. Let’s look at how Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management solves a real and serious problem for training and consulting firms that have accumulated thousands of PowerPoint spreads across hundreds of presentation decks. Every instructor or consultant relies on PowerPoint slides to train their clients in communication.

Training and management consulting firms catering to large corporations use PowerPoint slides for effective communication while delivering their message. A small consulting firm of 15 employees can have 3,000 slides requiring a specialized tool to manage those presentation slides and keep them up to date. You can use Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System to build your courseware faster than in PowerPoint. Simply search the Epoch slide™ intelligent library by keyword to find choice slides for the course lesson you are creating. You can reuse and assemble training modules to compose a custom courseware faster than the current methods available in PowerPoint.

SharePoint, FTP, Drive, DropBox and email are poor tools for managing thousands of slides because they are not designed to be a presentation management system. Imagine having to update 50 new slides created in 2017 across 100 or 200 presentation decks with a library of 3,000 to 6,000 slides. You would copy the required individual or groups of slides, open the target file and paste in each presentation deck. You would then need to repeat the same procedure hundreds of times, possibly opening more than 100 presentation decks, deleting old slides and pasting new slides in the correct order multiple times. Instead of pasting all 50 slides at once in a deck, you must selectively update each deck. This manual process is an extremely laborious and time-consuming task that can easily take a week or more to complete. Even after updating the slides is complete, the inadequate distribution of the slide library throughout the organization and the ability to quickly create custom courseware remains.

Now, imagine that Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System with an intelligent slide library has automated this process, saving you 80% of the required time. By uploading and replacing the original instance of the updated slide, all instances of this slide instantly get updated across multiple decks and become available to users. Furthermore, the process of creating a custom presentation for each opportunity is improved significantly by creating better PowerPoint decks faster. Using your firm’s slide library, you create a custom presentation in hours, not days or even weeks. This is realized because you have access to the entire slide library of approved and final content. You can search the slide library by keyword to find choice slides, assemble the slides in the desired order, save your work and download the presentation to deliver your courseware communication from laptop. You can also choose to present your training materials using Epoch Presentation™ iPad App.

Here are twelve ways a presentation management system can increase productivity for your organization:

Centralized PowerPoint slides are made available to users worldwide
Update a slide instantly across multiple decks
Eliminate courseware administrative headaches
Intelligent Slide Library has a powerful keyword search
Build better presentations extremely fast
Users won’t need to create slides from scratch
Use desktop, laptop or iPad app to create a custom presentation
Share your presentation link with your prospects and clients for free
Protect your brand by locking slides
Embed videos and animation to improve messaging
Reuse favorite slides to create custom presentations faster
Clone modules and assemble them to create courseware faster than other current methods

Presentation management systems increase your courseware composition productivity exponentially. Epoch Slide workflow process provides the tools to build custom courseware in record time and is unmatched by any other system or process available in PowerPoint. Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System is simply a must have “killer tool” for training and consulting firms looking for courseware management.

PowerPoint Slide Library Sofware

Posted on March 7, 2017March 10, 2017 by icpadmin

PowerPoint Slide Library Companies of all sizes have amassed thousands of slides over the years. The bad news is that these slides are scattered across outdated SharePoint, FTPs, network drives, and shared file systems. None of these systems are designed for presentation management, and none of them have an intelligent slide library.

Due to decentralized storage, users have difficulty finding the right slides to build their presentations quickly. Rather than concentrating on building effective presentations, they are searching in multiple locations and asking colleagues for the latest company-approved slides. Even worse, there are duplicate slides in existence that cannot be located easily, so users create yet more sets of duplicate slides. This is very common throughout many organizations that do not yet have Presentation Management System in place.

Let’s say you have decided to centralize your PowerPoint Slide Library and start evaluating Presentation Management System for your company. Here are some tips to help you organize your PowerPoint Slide Library for your business teams. The Presentation Management System is either available as managed hosting software as a service (SaaS) or an enterprise license installed on your intranet network web server. Regardless of the platform you choose, you will need to upload your entire slide library into Presentation Management System. The PowerPoint Slide Library is the core of the Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System.

You can build your online slide library folder by folder while uploading multiple presentations. This can be time-consuming if you have thousands of slides and hundreds of folders to upload and organize into a centralized slide library system. In most cases, the slide library is not organized locally, and the administrator tries to upload and organize as they learn to use Presentation Management System. Given the manual interaction of upload, the task completion time increases while you build your library in real time.

There is a better way: mapping your slide library locally on your computer. As the slide administrator, plan and build your PowerPoint Slide Library on your desktop with all the folders and subfolders organized for users by topic, subject, etc. Configure the Epoch Slide Autoloader with the account credentials, and select the top folder. Click “Upload” and watch the magic as your entire slide library is automatically replicated in Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System. Since you are not uploading manually, you can work faster to build your slide library and save weeks of work. The Autoloader will automatically create all folders and subfolders as well as upload presentations accordingly to replicate your slide library online.

Once your presentations are in the slide library, you can optimize presentation meta properties and add keyword tags to slides. Presentation meta tags and slide keywords are searchable, so users can find choice slides for their masterpiece. Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management System has many advanced features for its intelligent Slide Library. These advanced features let the administrator optimize the slide library by creating pre-built presentation for users very quickly. In addition to per-built presentations, you tag slides with keywords that help users search and find the right slides quickly.

Using a slide library, your business executive teams can build better presentations faster than they are now. Training consultants use Epoch Slide™ to build custom courseware faster because PowerPoint do not have these specialized advanced slide management tools. Our client’s feedback say “we speed up course-building” significantly.

Presentation Management System Increases Sales

Posted on February 27, 2017March 7, 2017 by icpadmin

Presentation Management Developing Rapidly in 10 Years

It’s no secret that leveraging technology in every aspect of your business is more critical today than ever before. It is impossible to cover all the technologies used in every department daily. Therefore, in this series, I will cover technologies utilized in marketing and sales to close more business. In the last five to seven years, technology for Presentation Management, digital asset management, and content marketing has developed rapidly.

Let’s look at how Presentation Management solves real, serious problems for medium and large multi-national corporations. Corporations as well as training and management consulting firms have accumulated thousands of PowerPoint spreads across hundreds of presentations decks. They rely on these PowerPoint slides for communication throughout their organizations and with their clients. Every executive in a corporation relies on effective communication using PowerPoint presentations for everything from marketing and sales to annual meetings and more. Training and management consulting firms who cater to those large corporations use PowerPoint slides for effective communication while delivering their message. A small consulting firm of 15 can have 3,000 slides and require a specialized tool to manage those slides and presentations and keep them up to date.

SharePoint, FTPs, and email are poor tools for managing thousands of slides because they are not designed as presentation management systems. Imagine having to update 50 new slides created in 2017 across 100 or 200 presentation decks with a library of 3,000 to 5,000 slides. You would copy the required individual or groups of slides, open the target file, and paste in each presentation deck. Then, you would have to repeat the same procedure hundreds of times, opening each presentation deck, deleting old slides, and pasting the new slides in the correct order. This manual process is extremely laborious and time-consuming. It can easily take a week or more to complete. Even after the slide update procedure is complete, the adequate distribution throughout the organization for creating a custom presentation remains.

Now, imagine that today’s Presentation Management System, which comes with an intelligent Slide Library, automates this slide update process to save 80% of the required time. Furthermore, the process to create a custom presentation for each opportunity is improved significantly. Using the Slide Library, you now can create a custom presentation in hours as compared to days or even weeks. This is realized because you have access to an entire Slide Library of approved content. CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, and sales executives can search the Slide Library using keywords to find choice slides, assemble presentations in the desired order, and download them to deliver their messages.

Here are twelve ways Presentation Management System can increase productivity for your organization.

PowerPoint slide library is hosted in a centralized location available to users worldwide.
Slide update processes replace original slides instantly across multiple decks.
Eliminate slide update administrative headaches.
The intelligent Slide Library has a powerful search tool that uses keyword tags.
You can create a custom presentation extremely fast.
You don’t have to create slides from scratch.
You can use a desktop, laptop, or iPad app to create a custom presentation.
You can share a presentation link with your prospects and clients with no need for a license.
You brand is protected and preserved by prohibiting changes to slides.
You can embed videos and animation in slides to improve messaging.
You can reuse slides to create custom presentations faster.
You can reuse modules to create courseware faster than any other method.

Presentation Management System increases your executives’ productivity using a multi-fold process that ultimately helps close more sales. Training professionals can use the same process to build custom courseware in record time unmatched by any other system or process.

Epoch Slide™ vs. SharePoint Slide Library Management

Posted on November 26, 2016February 23, 2017 by Rajiv R. Prasad

iClickPoint™ is now Epoch Slide™

Leverage Epoch Slide™ to build better presentations faster with Brand consistency

Epoch Slide™ vs. SharePoint blog posted earlier is expanded by weighing in Presentation Management, PowerPoint Slide Library and Presentation Composer

I am expanding the 14 reasons why Epoch Slide™ is superior to SharePoint for presentation management and as a presentation composer. Epoch Slide™ presentation management system is developed from ground up specifically for PowerPoint presentation and slide content management. Think of Epoch Slide™ as an elegant PowerPoint CMS that SharePoint does not even close in comparison to the functionality and ease of using in building custom presentations.

Epoch Presentation™ iPad App works lightning fast when searching for choice slides and while composing a custom presentation.

Epoch Pad™ HTML let Android users have full administration and compose custom presentation quickly.

Epoch Slide™ Presentation Management Solution

available anytime, anywhere 24/7
adhere to compliance and regulatory guidelines easily
deliver only approved slides
enable non-editable slides
hosted on a secure, managed server
increase brand message consistency
overcome geographic limitations

Intelligent slide library

admin can share link to a presentation just uploaded
slide association make multiple decks update easy
group slides to keep intended order
low cost per user
minimal to no support needed all year long
Salesforce.com to EpochSlide™ Presentation Composer by SSO (single sign-on)

Epoch Presentation™ iPad App for Composing Presentations

intuitive UI, easy to use
create a slide show and share link
quickly build custom presentation on desktop, laptop, iPad and HTML Tablets
quickly reuse saved presentation by adding or deleting slides
Epoch Presentation™ iPad App Presentation Composer

As you can see EpochSlide™ presentation management for PowerPoint Slide Library provides an intelligent solution for users and administrator alike. EpochSlide™ provides advanced tools for managing the company’s slide library. Admin can quickly create themed presentation for teams based on subject being promoted.

EpochSlide™ Presentation Composer desktop, HTML 5 and iPad provide super easy-to-use tool for composing better custom presentation. You don’t have to worry about design or slide content because you have access to the latest high impact company approved for you to use to compose your presentation quickly.

SharePoint is more of a repository of slides in a file system that you can download or checkout.

SharePoint Server Slide Library

discontinued support for SharePoint Slide Library 2016
file system based
difficult to use
no way to build presentation quickly
you need to download slides and assemble in PPT
no drag & drop UI
Does not create a slide show of the pictures.
Does not have the larger thumbnail option of a picture when you hover over the item.
The library menu is 2007 style, and thus looks different from other SharePoint 2010 libraries.
Has a complicated way of uploading pictures using the “Picture Manager” application.
Slide Library is discontinued in SharePoint 2013
No iPad drag & drop Presentation Builder
No Salesforce.com to a presentation builder integration
No presentation embed capability
No iPad App

The SharePoint Slide Library is mostly a default feature available for users. You will have to create a custom application in SharePoint to match the same functionality of EpochSlide™ presentation management system. Furthermore the technical challenge is greater as compared to other platforms such as .Net, HTML 5, iOS and others.

7 Tips for Preparing Your PowerPoint Slide Decks for an Online Library

Posted on March 2, 2015February 23, 2017 by Rajiv R. Prasad

Over the past few years, I have interacted with prospects and clients that are exploring online slide library tools like Epoch Slide for presentation management.

One scenario is consistently present in all of the cases I’ve seen—the slides are decentralized and scattered among two or more groups that are responsible for designing, distributing and maintaining the company’s PowerPoint slides.

To begin with, I frequently found that the slide’s decks have accumulated multiple masters over time. The first task on your “slide library prep list” is to clean it up, reducing it to a single master for each PowerPoint slide deck.

The second item on your checklist is to make sure no other font type is used directly on a slide outside of the master style. Some slides we encountered were contaminated with multiple font types placed by way of copying and pasting slides that had different masters. “Title” and “Content” sometimes looked “normal” visually; however, when uploaded to a slide library application such as iClickPoint, the “real” font is revealed during the conversion for database storage. Of course, this translated to online slides showing the incorrect font type in titles and content.

To date, I have not seen a PowerPoint deck with the Document Properties fields completely filled out. Traditionally, these properties were not often used; however, in the online slide library world, the PowerPoint document properties, “Author,” “Title,” “Subject,” “Keywords,” “Category” and “Status” play a key role in searching slides. That’s why this is the third important item on your slide library prep checklist.

Good keywords in your slide content are highly recommended as the fourth item on your list. Updating your Title and Content while you are refreshing your slides is a good boost to getting accurate search results for that perfect slide your team is looking for.

Similar to SEO practice for optimizing meta properties of a web page for Google and others, you need to optimize your slides. PowerPoint Document Properties is limited to the presentation deck level. Online presentation management tools such as iClickPoint provide tagging at the slide level for more granular search results for users. For now, be sure that the slide titles are optimized and possibly include a keyword. You can tag slides after you upload them to your online library account.

The fifth item on your checklist for preparing your slide library is to optimize your slides with the proper graphic format and resolution. Not all slides I come across are optimized by design. Slides having overlapping graphics should have their own boundaries. Grouped graphics with transparency should be properly prepared in Photoshop in PNG file format and not rely on a wizard or tool within PowerPoint. Poor graphic formats will be caught and flagged by most online slide library and presentation management tools.

The sixth item on your checklist deals with user common denominators such as font types. Bullet points are a concern because not all desktop bullets translate properly online, especially if the bullets are based on a font installed on the designer’s local computer. We have come across bullet conversion issues on a slide for a multi-national corporation. It was a font issue, so we simply installed that font on our server to support our client’s requirements on the fly. However, it is a good practice to standardize design and style such that fonts used in your presentations are readily available on your user’s computer, and thus preserving your brand as intended during distribution and download. (I recommend skipping the bullets and having infographics designed in their place. Your slides will look more professional and your message will be heard more clearly than bullets.)

The seventh task can be a little daunting when a user inserts a 4000 x 3500 pixel resolution photograph on a slide or their web homepage. Graphic resolution and size problems continuously come up in slides because of inexperienced users mixing print and screen resolution when inserting images in slides without editing the images first.

Using 300 dpi print resolution images on slides intended for 72 dpi screen presentation and online distribution, unnecessarily increases file size. This becomes measurable when the administrator has to upload hundreds of presentation decks having 200%, 300% or an even larger size than necessary simply due to a lack of optimization. This is why it’s necessary for you to prepare and optimize presentations slide by slide. You will be able to truly utilize the power of an online slide library and reap tremendous benefits. It pays to prepare.

There you have it. I have shared the top seven problems our clients have faced with their slide library preparation and tips to resolve these issues. I present to you a possible road to success when your company decides to embrace Presentation System and empower your teams for more wins.

You may ask, “We have over 3,000 slides, how do we create so many folders and upload these presentations?”

With over 25 years of experience in the technology industry, I still get goose bumps when innovation we create does its job. It feels magical to me, so I am very pleased to introduce a tool called “Library Builder.” It automatically replicates or creates all folders and uploads your presentations from your local slide library onto the iClickPoint intelligent slide library system for you.

This alone will save you a week’s worth of tedious manual labor. I hope you can see how beautiful and almost magical this tool can be from the company’s presentation manager’s point of view. What a sigh of relief! Web Epoch can help make your presentation management headaches go away.

Rajiv Prasad is the Chief Innovation Officer at Web Epoch Interactive and the creator of iClickPoint presentation management system. To sign-up of our 90-day pilot program, please visit www.iclickpoint.com and submit the contact form.