Enterprise Files for Everyday Use
Presentation management balances both sides of the enterprise: the high-level corporate brand and objectives with the everyday tasks of the employees out in the field -- the folks whose day-to-day tasks are what actually build the business. Presentation management makes enterprise files available for everyday use and vice versa. It’s like a merger of content. Achieving this requires three key components: cloud-based technology that can store, update and track presentations; analytics and machine learning that can recognize patterns in and the effectiveness of presentations; and a cultural shift toward thinking about presentations differently.
These components, when combined, will change the nature of presentations in your organization.
Modern technology is the backbone of a great presentation management strategy. Of course, we at Shufflrr built just such technology and would like to sell it to you. But whether you buy it from someone else or build it yourself, the discipline of presentation management requires a few key elements.
Amazingly, in this era of ubiquitous cloud computing, most companies don’t have a central cloud repository of presentation slides. Slides get stored everywhere. Individuals keep decks on their laptops. Some groups might share a Google Drive or dump presentations into a shared Dropbox account. Some companies used SharePoint’s Slide Library, which has been discontinued. But whether we’re talking about a small business or a?Fortune?500 corporation, it’s rare to find a single, organized, sophisticated cloud solution for presentations.
It might seem obvious, but if slides are scattered in all sorts of pockets of storage, they can’t be shared, reused, and monitored for compliance and consistency. The only way to get this party started is to get all presentations into one place in one location, preferably a cloud drive that anyone with permission can access.
So, step one: Establish or buy (from us!) a central presentation repository and upload all of the company’s presentation files. Remember, these files are not limited to PowerPoint, they could include video, images, brochure PDFs, etc. When we refer to?presentation files?in this book, we are talking about anything that can be presented.
Step two: Make this library accessible to everyone in your organization with the proper permissions. Permissions are important because they direct users to the content that they need, and they help manage risk and ensure compliance.
Step three: Dedicate a person or group to guide presentation strategy and direction. The presentation directors are responsible for ensuring that the presentation management strategy is planned and implemented in your company. Think of it like an advertising director who is responsible for all of the development, execution, and measurement of the company’s advertising, or an event manager who is responsible for selecting the conferences and ensuring that the right employees are attending with the right collateral. We’ll go deeper into what skill set a director of presentation management should have in the next chapter. But for now, our point is that someone in the company should own the presentation strategy.
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Once presentations are in the cloud, the next step is to make them “active.” That means making them visual, searchable, accessible, and reusable. They are permissioned, and their use is tracked. Visual files are files that are formatted to present. You can preview them for yourself and present them to a client all from the same place. Search is a pretty standard feature but we all know that some search engines are better than others at helping you find the content you need. Combine search with visualized results and you’ve instantly solved one problem: how to help employees find the right slides for their decks.
Accessible files are ones that your team can get to easily. Permissions enable accessibility because they direct users to content that is relevant to their job. And finally, reusable files refer to the ability to take a file or slide from a file and put it in a new presentation without a lot of hassle. For our clients, we provide a tray where users can drag and drop files and slides, put them in order, and then save them out as a new file. It’s like an Amazon shopping cart, except you are shopping for slides, and other content, instead of stuff.
In contrast, the opposite of active files is dormant files -- files that are hidden, asleep on your network somewhere, and are hard to find. Active files, on the contrary, are ready to work --?ready to present?-- from anywhere, anytime. A sales rep presenting at her customer’s office can find and access the files and present them within seconds. Or she could share a large-file video with her colleague across town.
Going back to the mid-1990s, every solution we developed for our clients has had a slide library. It’s the foundation of a presentation strategy. Whether your build one or buy one, a slide library becomes the catalyst for changing files from one-and-done to enterprise assets.
A slide library is a critical component of presentation management because it makes files really easy to reuse. It makes them active. Your employees don’t want to just grab a whole presentation and use it as is – rarely does an entire presentation used in one setting fit another time and place. Employees instead need a library of finely crafted, approved slides that they can draw from to create their own presentations for their own situations. In a slide library, your files are broken down into their elements. A PowerPoint deck will show all of the slides separately within that file. So you can pick and choose the slides you want. A video will appear already formatted as a slide, ready to play. The system will show a Word doc or PDF in its entirety, but with each page broken down, so again you can pick and choose which pages you need.
Now, you’re probably thinking, I can already do that in PowerPoint and Word -- just highlight what I want and copy and paste it into my new file. So what do I need a slide library for?
First, with a slide library, all files are formatted and ready to present. You can review all the slides, files, pages, videos, etc. with one click. It lets you preview all files side by side, or toggle easily from one to the other, and then another, without a big mess of 20 open documents cluttering up your desktop screen. So you can find exactly what you are looking for.
Second, once you’ve found what you’re looking for, a slide library has the functionality to let you select content efficiently, with drag-and-drop or one-click to select individual slides, videos, etc. into your new presentation. This is much more efficient than scrolling through a bunch of open files on your desktop. You can see it, move it, drag and drop it, put it in a specific order, and save it.
Presentation management breaks the larger files down into pieces, so users can access the pieces that they need to customize their new presentation.