What happened?
Starting with SharePoint 2013, Microsoft surprisingly dropped support for their popular slide library feature. SharePoint’s slide library gave users access to PowerPoint content on a single slide-level. Further, it provided a picture preview of each slide, allowing users to quickly determine which slide they needed.
While the UI was a little rough, SharePoint’s slide library was an important tool for marketing and sales teams across multiple industries. As companies upgraded SharePoint, users were often caught off-guard, losing access to an important feature and desperately looking to replace it.
Our Solution
In the following years, several 3rd party solutions have been introduced, including our own TeamSlide. However, many of these solutions ignore SharePoint (and other content systems), requiring users to recreate their repository on their own proprietary platforms. This strategy poses 2 primary issues:
- Manually rebuilding large repositories with metadata is extremely cumbersome, regardless of how easy the system tries to make it
- Most slide library offerings are point solutions with limited integration. As such, the repository is not usable by other technologies
When building TeamSlide, we spoke with marketing and sales teams across multiple industries and developed 2 key design tenants.
Two Key Design Tenants
- Leverage existing content repositories like SharePoint to the fullest extent possible
- Automatically replicate content
- Pull in all existing metadata
- Place access to the library where users work – in PowerPoint
- A visual preview of search results
- Click to insert slides into the users’ active presentation
Expecting users to drastically change their habits inhibits adoption and impacts productivity. Effective slide library solutions need to leverage existing content systems and fit into current workflows.
If your team lost SharePoint’s slide library solution, request a demo of TeamSlide and we’d be happy to set up a free trial. You’ll be able to search your PowerPoint presentations in SharePoint on a single-slide level, from within PowerPoint.
