Jennifer Ann Mason

This is the third post in my series about a sample Intranet Marketing Intranet site. In this post we are going to be covering what I think is one of the most under-used features in SharePoint. I think it is mostly because people are not aware of what it can do for you. So in this post we will cover the features in detail and hopefully encourage some of you to start to utilize this functionality.

What is it?

The Slide Library is one of the default list type templates available in SharePoint. You can access it when you are creating new content.

The purpose of this library is to create a centralized location that allows you to easily find, manage and reuse existing slides. The idea behind it is that you can have a central store of slides that can be reused in any PowerPoint presentation.

When would we use it?

Some common example of when you could use this, include the following:

• Boiler Plate Content
  
  • About Us
    
  • Company Information
    
  • Contact Information
    
• Common Training Slides
  
• Header Slides
  
  • Demo
    
  • Thanks for Coming
    
  • Questions
    

How does it work?

The slide library works using a concept of publishing slides to the library.

When you choose to publish slides you will be prompted to select a presentation. Once the presentation loads you will be able to select what slides from that presentation you want to load into the library.

Once the slides are published completely (this tends to take some time, so be patient!) you will see them as items in your slide library.

Now users will be able to select the slides from the library and the reuse them in their presentations. They do this by selecting the slides they need and then clicking on “Copy Slide to Presentation”. A menu will then be displayed that asks you where you want to put the slide (into an existing presentation or a new one), what to do with the formatting and then if you want to be notified when the slide changes.

The slide will be downloaded to your presentation and will be formatted based on your selection. You can continue working on your presentation and then save the presentation to its final location. The next time you open the presentation you will be prompted to check for updates to the slides.

If there are updates you will be prompted on how you would like to incorporate them into your presentation.

You can:

• Replace: replace the existing slide with the new content
  
• Append: add the updated slide as a new slide and keep the original
  
• Skip: Take no action for the current slide, review the next change
  
• Cancel: Exit the process
  

How is it being used in our sample Marketing Intranet Site?

For our example in this series we are using the slide library to store the “approved” set of slides provided by marketing. This includes the common boiler plate slides and company information slides. User will be trained to access the boiler plate slides here and to incorporate them into their presentations. By doing this we can provide an easy way to “push” updates to all of our presentations when we want to change one of the common slides.