Congratulations! You've just signed up to Slidebank. It's the start of an exciting journey to put powerful content in the hands of your colleagues and to get your team aligned.
Creating your Slidebank site is super quick. It takes mere moments for us to build your brand new site and send out your login details.
Once you have your login details, there are a few things you might to consider in your plan to roll out Slidebank to your team and beyond.
1. Defining your first users
Who is going to benefit from the first rollout of your Slidebank deployment? Is it just for your initial team, or are you looking at having multiple departments on there at once?
It's good to have an idea of who will be on there at the beginning, and where you might end up later on because this might inform some of your decisions about abilities and security settings.
So it's best now to think who your users are and which Roles (or teams if you like) and Departments these users belong to. This will also help you with ....
2. Defining your Administrators
Slidebank is a self-service tool. That means that, although we're here to support you in the background, you can do everything to administer the account within the app itself.
Some of these tasks are:
Adding and removing user profiles
Seeing how your account is being used
Defining user abilities
Uploading content
Managing security settings and Single Sign On
Creating folder structures
Adding and removing Roles and Departments
There's a lot that Admins can do within Slidebank, so it's worth thinking carefully about who your site admins should be. In general, the best Administrators are:
People likely to be able to take responsibility for the site long term (adoption and usage can easily lose traction when there's a lot of Administrator churn)
Someone who is close to the content and has a vested interest in making sure it's distributed consistently. Slidebank finds a natural home with Marketing Managers.
Someone who is excited about the potential of getting great content into the hands of sales reps.
It may be that you have more than one Slidebank Administrator. This is totally fine and can be very helpful for sharing the load. For example, you might have an Admin in Marketing who manages all of your content, and an Admin in Sales who is responsible for rolling out the tool to the Sales organization and growing that side of your user base.
For this reason, there are two types of Administrator in Slidebank:
Super Admins - are 'full-site' Administrators, meaning that they can add and remove Departments and administer the site across the full breadth of the account
Admins - are more like Departmental Admins, having jurisdiction to manage only users and abilities within the Departments they belong to
There are no technical limits to the number of Admins you can have (and there are no billing implications for making someone an Admin). One thing to watch out for is if you have too many, their actions may start to cancel each other out!
3. Thinking about how controlled you want to be
Slidebank is a very flexible tool in terms of the permissions you give your users. You can use this as an extremely controlled environment for simply viewing content, or as a more open platform for file sharing.
Your workflows and the level of control you want to have will determine the Abilities settings that are right for you and your user groups.
Some organizations have need for settings on the more restrictive side. These include:
Organizations from regulated industries, e.g. Pharma.
Organizations where brand compliance is very important.
Companies that have invested heavily in their slide content and want to maintain its integrity.
Companies giving access to parts of Slidebank to more 'casual' users, e.g. business associates.
Some of the more restrictive ways of using Slidebank are:
To make sure only Admins can upload new content. That way, you know every slide has been approved.
To group slides together, locking them in a particular order and/or making them mandatory. This is great for forcing the inclusion of legal disclaimers, or simply grouping together modular content, such as case studies.
Locking the objects of slides so that they cannot be edited by your users in PowerPoint. This way, you can make entire files or just certain slides Read-Only.
Restricting the manner in which users can download files. You can stop them downloading altogether and just have them use the built-in slideshow mode if you wish. Or you can have everything turned into a PDF prior to download.
Restricting users' ability to share files - within the system or via email.
Requiring users to log into their Department as they're logging into Slidebank - enforcing 'Chinese Walls' within the business and replicating organizational silos.
Only allowing users access to Slidebank when on-premise or from other restricted IP addresses.
Creating 'core slides' that are automatically added to new presentations before a single slide has been chosen. Really useful for legal disclaimers.
Only allowing users to save slide selections as 'Virtual' files, which will automatically update as core content changes.
There are myriad combinations of abilities settings for you to choose from. You don't need to have the same settings for everyone either. You can create abilities profiles by Department, Role or even bespoke settings for individual users. To make things easy, we've created 'Minimal Abilities' and 'Normal Abilities' settings to give you a head-start.
We'll discuss Abilities with you on your setup call to help you customise Slidebank for your needs.
4. Preparing your content
Starting out with Slidebank is a brilliant opportunity to put your best foot forward with high quality content.
Since this will be a repository for your best slides (that will get used repeatedly across your company), it's a good time to do a content audit.
If you've gone through a recent rebrand, for example, it's best to put your most up to date PowerPoint files into Slidebank, rather than using it as a file archive of older content.
Your content in Slidebank will evolve over time as you make updates, but it's best to start off with your best content only.
5. Organising your content
You'll need to create folders in your library for files to live inside. Each Department has its own directory (a Department houses both files and users).
You can create new folders in the library by using the 'Add New Folder' button.
When it comes to uploading your files, you can do this in bulk by simply dragging a number of files on top of a folder. Those files will all be uploaded into that folder. This will happen in the background so you can continue working in Slidebank.
6. Preparing for rollout and training
We will train the first wave of users for you via a webinar, which can be recorded and shared with new users down the line. We'll do the same for your Admin training.
Outside of this, you may want to think about how to introduce Slidebank to your users - outlining the benefits and explaining why you are asking them to use it.
A first experience of Slidebank is most powerful when there is a strong body of content in there for each user to see, and users are able to take action in the platform straight away.
It's worth spending time up front on the setup (making sure each user can see files and getting your Abilities set up). As soon as the training session is done and enthusiasm is high, you can then send out login details for people to start using Slidebank right away.
Whilst this may sound like a lot to think about, it should be fairly straight forward, and your Slidebank site will continue to evolve as you go forwards. Your 'get started checklist' looks like this:
Create user profiles
Define administrators
Upload content
Set user abilities
Train and onboard users
If you have any learnings from your own rollout experience, please do let us know and we'll share that with other users.