Powerpoint
TeamSlide Review – How A Few Simple Tools Can Boost Productivity
At Presentation Guru, we continuously try to showcase new technologies to our audience to help them be better presenters. Here’s an article by Kartik Sundar, co-founder of TeamSlide, an innovative slide library solution that helps organizations instantly find all their PowerPoint content. TeamSlide helps manage your slides and lets you access them from within PowerPoint. Whether you have a small team or a global organization, TeamSlide can help you increase productivity and improve your content management practices.
We’ve been greatly impressed by TeamSlide and the benefits it creates. Check out Kartik’s article and get a free TeamSlide trial.
In my experience as a former consultant and heavy PowerPoint user, the presentations I’ve seen typically evolve over time and rarely start from a blank slate. Whether you have a one-off presentation to a large audience or an ongoing engagement with a small team, your presentations likely use components from previous work that you have updated and improved. Almost all the presentations I’ve built have started by first pulling together a few old slides from different presentations; some new content is created, and the old slides are updated to form a new story.
Finding old content, however, is a tedious, inefficient process that becomes even more frustrating if you work in a team. You can picture that slide you need but have no idea where the latest version is. You typically have to scour your shared drive, email others, and flip through a dozen decks only to find that you’ve wasted a couple of hours and still don’t quite have the slide you wanted. You might end up accidentally using an outdated slide or even end up recreating the slide in a rush. The end result is lost time, reduced presentation quality, and frustrated team members.
TeamSlide was born to solve this content management problem. It is a slide library or presentation management solution that increases productivity, drives consistency, and facilitates knowledge sharing. With TeamSlide, you can organize your slides and easily access them directly through PowerPoint.
“We’re using TeamSlide and it’s awesome! The tool is simple and intuitive, and you don’t have to go through hundreds of ppt presentations you created earlier to find that one special slide.”
Microsoft’s SharePoint used to include a slide library feature but it was removed starting with SharePoint 2013. And even when it was included, the slide library feature was clunky and missing important features. TeamSlide serves as a much improved replacement for SharePoint’s slide library feature.
TeamSlide keeps your PowerPoint content at your fingertips
With TeamSlide, users can search, preview and insert content without ever leaving PowerPoint. Our PowerPoint add-in is the primary interface and acts similarly to Google image-search for all your slides. Within PowerPoint, the TeamSlide pane features a search bar that returns preview images of all slides that match your search criteria. You can scroll through the preview images and quickly ascertain which slide you need. Then a simple click inserts the slide into your presentation. If you’d like to share a new slide with your team, you can right-click and upload it to TeamSlide. You can also go beyond slides and separately store slide components including charts, images, videos, text, and shapes. This way you can find the specific element, like a product image or marketing quote, that you need.
“TeamSlide is intuitive and easy to use. I love that I can preview and insert slides right from within PowerPoint!”
The TeamSlide server is the brains of the solution and can be either in our cloud or installed on your premise. The TeamSlide server stores all the slides and contains the intelligent search algorithms that ensure you get the slide you need. You can upload content directly to TeamSlide, or the server can connect to your content management system, making all your presentations searchable on a slide level. The TeamSlide server has a simple web interface where you can organize your content in libraries, control access, set your security requirements, and manage users. Our access control feature lets you very specifically decide what slides each person or group in your team can access or edit.
TeamSlide can also ensure that you always have the latest slides before you walk into a presentation. If another team member updates a few slides that you are using, TeamSlide will notify you that new versions exist and lets you update these slides with a click. With our latest release, you can even access the slide history and download old versions.
TeamSlide has been proven to boost productivity
“I just used it for the first time, and it blew my mind! This tool is awesome, and saves so much time compared to [traditional methods]”
When working with customers, we fully engage to ensure both technical and business success. We often run surveys to measure business benefits and our users overwhelmingly tell us that:
- TeamSlide adds value on a daily basis and they would be disappointed to lose it
- It helps save a significant amount of time during the presentation creation process
- Their presentations have improved since using TeamSlide, leading to other downstream benefits (e.g. better chance at closing a sale)
- They would be willing to highly recommend TeamSlide to their colleagues to help with presentation management
Our offering also includes training and support to ensure that the entire organization, from end-users to administrators, is comfortable with the full suite of features and benefits. We then revisit our customers from time to time to collect feedback and understand what new features would create the largest benefits for their businesses. The two-way conversation helps us continuously create value. TeamSlide uses a subscription model, which gives users access to all the latest features as soon as they are ready.
From a technical standpoint, we first understand the current workflows and determine how TeamSlide can neatly incorporate within your knowledge management and IT requirements. Whether you can work in the cloud or just with your servers, TeamSlide meets the strictest security requirements. Further, we continually analyze our server and add-in performance to make sure you can access to your content quickly whenever and wherever you are.
A wide variety of users can benefit from TeamSlide
From small teams to large global organizations, we have a large variety of users benefiting from our slide library solution. Small teams will often use TeamSlide to manage a set of frequently used content including templates, frameworks, images, and marketing collateral. They use it for a variety of tasks including proposal creation, market research, and other deliverables. We support small teams by sharing best practices for presentation management along with our typical training sessions.
“We were consistently hunting for slides when we were pitching. TeamSlide has allowed us to consolidate and easily access all our important marketing content”
Large organizations integrate TeamSlide into their knowledge management practice, typically connecting it with their existing content management system and workflow. This allows their entire PowerPoint content repository to be searchable on a slide level from PowerPoint. Users can also easily contribute to the repository by recommending slide updates and new content. In addition, TeamSlide can use your authentication server, enabling single sign-on and simplifying access. If your organization has an archive of old presentations, you likely have some great content that is buried and difficult to access. TeamSlide can quickly surface relevant slides and help you maximize the value of your previous work.
“Of all our PowerPoint tools, TeamSlide is a game changer! It is immensely helpful to find slides like this rather than having to use our [CMS] and dig through presentations.”
Finding slides and leveraging previous work is an important step in the presentation creation process. TeamSlide was designed from the ground-up to help make this step seamless, helping boost productivity and output quality. Our users consistently tell us that they love the product because of the impact it has on their work. From a technology perspective, we have a flexible architecture that stands alone or neatly integrates with your systems, processes, and people. Over the next 6 to 12 months we are planning on adding a host of new capabilities focused on providing even more value.
If your organization uses PowerPoint on regular basis, take a moment to try TeamSlide! We offer a no-hassle free trial that will allow you to quickly determine the productivity gains for yourself. We’d be happy to help with your trial and maximize the use of your time. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or if there’s anything we can do to help.
At the Guru, we’re happy to share new technologies like this because we think our great readership will help determine which ones will have significant impact. We like to encourage, support, and showcase presentation technologies because as presentation professionals new products can help greatly improve the way we work.
Kartik Sundar
Latest posts by Kartik Sundar (see all)
- Make Your Point With Simple, Clear Charts - 17th October 2016
- TeamSlide Review – How A Few Simple Tools Can Boost Productivity - 22nd August 2016