TeamSlide is a powerful PowerPoint slide search solution (with an add-in) that allows users to search, insert, and preview slides, images, and videos. We integrate with several CMSs including SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive, essentially bringing the CMS inside PowerPoint. We focus on providing a slide level search engine that works entirely within PowerPoint and allows users to create a slide library.
How exactly can we do this? We can provide a slide level search within PowerPoint through continuous and seamless content replication and indexing.
Content replication
Connecting to your CMS is a 2-step process. (Check out our video on How to connect your CMS to TeamSlide) First, we establish a link to your account. Second, we create a task to replicate content from specific folders.
When setting up a replication link, you will grant TeamSlide permission to your account within your content management system (such as Box, SharePoint, or OneDrive). Note that TeamSlide only reads content from your CMS and doesn’t write to it.
After a replication link is established, a replication task will be created. Once you’ve selected the folder(s) you want TeamSlide to access, it will seamlessly copy all of a user’s selected PowerPoint content, images, and videos to our servers or TeamSlide servers on your premise.
This process is highly customizable as users can select specific folders and sub-folders within their CMS to copy over. You can add multiple replication links/tasks, depending on the number of CMSs you have. For example, many users connect to both Box and SharePoint. Once users choose which folders and data types to replicate, you’ll be able to designate the content to a library and establish who can access it.
For security measures, the content is encrypted during this process through transport encryption. TeamSlide uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to securely protect transported and stored data.
What is AES encryption?
“Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was established by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001 and it aims to offer a specification for the electronic data encryption… AES can be used by public and private organizations for free in their commercial and non-commercial programs” Logsign
Indexing and preview generation
As part of the replication process, TeamSlide will index all of the replicated content. Indexing is a technique used to find and access data quickly. Indexing allows TeamSlide to search content on a slide
How indexing works with search engines
“Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers. When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the searcher’s query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking.” Moz
This process is precisely how TeamSlide works as a search engine for PowerPoint content. When you run a search, TeamSlide processes your request and identifies all of the content that best matches your search terms based on its full-text index. TeamSlide ranks these search results by relevance to best match what you are looking for.
In addition to indexing, TeamSlide will take a snapshot of each unique slide to create thumbnails. These thumbnails allow the user to see a preview of their content within the TeamSlide pane in PowerPoint, permitting users to visually identify the content that they’ve searched for. Further, TeamSlide can automatically pull in metadata from your CMS, allowing you to leverage all your content management effort. The metadata can be used to search, filter results, and browse content.
TeamSlide continues to automatically check your content repository, such as SharePoint or Box, for new or updated content every 60 minutes. New and updated content is automatically replicated and indexed. One of the benefits of this continuous process is automated version control. This seamless process takes the stress out of version control as you can depend on TeamSlide to keep you aware of out-of-date slides.
TeamSlide ensures your CMS remains your single source of truth. Rather than replacing your CMS, a tall task, TeamSlide augments its capabilities, giving users incredibly easy access to slides, images, and videos.
TeamSlide effortlessly enables you to build better, up-to-date presentations faster with our slide search engine. We are continually striving to help you increase productivity and ease the frustrations of hunting for PowerPoint content.
If you have any questions or need additional support using TeamSlide, please email us at support@teamsli.de.