As usual, this quarter our developers worked hard to further improve the quality of the SlideHub platform.

This time around we discussed:

• What we’ve been up to in Q1, including:
  • Efforts to further increase the speed and stability of the platform
  • Improved navigation experience
  • High resolution image support
  • Automatic file validation
  • Enhanced library management tools
    

• Our plan for Q2 is to further help drive increased proposal win-rates with:
  • Proposal wizard to further streamline the proposal creation process
  • Improved placeholder
  • A presenter role for users who don’t need to build many slides
    

• Our way of AI implementation to improve end-user experience

You can watch the whole recording of the webinar here.

What is new in Quarter 1?

Increased the speed and stability of the Platform

In 2023, we focused a lot on adding a large number of new features to the platform to further enhance the capabilities of the library and to fulfill our clients' requests that would highly benefit other users as well. But this time around we also decided to invested time in getting the core more solid and stable. To do so, we released the largest code change in the company's history. As part of the code change, we invested more than 100 hours in manual testing of the entire platform. During this process, we found various small edge cases (issues/bugs) that were not currently well handled. With this update, we have fixed more than 20 such issues. Additionally, the new framework provides better-automated system testing (type control) and provides a slightly faster experience in the browser.

In order to check slide versions and enable dynamic actions, the SlideHub application runs ongoing checks on the selected content e.g. is an icon selected, or is the currently selected slide up-to-date. Especially on PCs, these checks would have a tendency to make the PowerPoint application load and show a small "spinner" for a few microseconds. Enabled by the code change we also managed to reduce computer resources associated with scanning for versions and dynamic actions, providing users with a smoother experience. Furthermore, we rewrote a lot of the logic associated with updating slides directly from PowerPoint. As a result, the experience is now faster and provides better real-time tracking of the upload and update progress.

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Improved navigation experience

Making sure that everything in SlideHub can be found quickly and easily is an important goal for us because time saved searching for the right asset is time you can spend developing better content!​

What did we focus on?

• Clearly separated the end-user and management experience
• We created more space for the category list, making navigation smoother​
• We moved the 'updated slides' into each library for easier access​
• The number of updated slides is now more visually apparent in the list view​
• The search all feature has moved to the top when relevant​ 

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To see it in action, watch the video below:

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High resolution image support

When people want to visually enhance their slides, they usually want to use very high-resolution images that render well. But high-resolution images make the file very large and hard to work with and anyways most images in PowerPoint do not need to be 1000s of pixels large to render well.

Wat did we focus on?

• SlideHub now resizes images wider than 1200px to be "only" 1200px before being inserted - for HD images this can result in an 80-90% size reduction, but generally this works well for almost all presentation scenarios
• Still give you the option to access the original high-quality image

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This features enables you to still have high quality images within your presentations while keeping the file size lower and thus easier to work with.

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Automatic file validation

In order to ensure the best possible experience when using SlideHub (for the end-users mainly) we have introduced several automated validation steps. When a presentation is uploaded to the SlideHub Platform, before starting the process of adding it to the company library, the system automatically validates it.

If any of the following issues arise a warning will appear:​

• Too large file size​
• File contains slide with zoom link​
• File contains custom font​
• File contains internal links​
• File contains multiple language settings​
• The file contains sensitive content

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File validation is key for a few reasons:‍

• ‍User Experience: It helps users by giving them quick feedback on any issues during file upload, making the whole process smoother
• ‍Compatibility: Validation ensures files meet system requirements, avoiding format issues or unsupported features
• ‍Compliance: It helps organizations follow data integrity, security, and format standards‍
• Data Integrity: Validating files helps to prevent errors or corruption during storage or transmission

Read this helpdesk article that helps you resolve each type of issue you might face when uploading a slide: Automatic File Validation Before Uploading Slides

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To see it in action, watch the video below:

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Enhanced library management tool‍

We further improved the experience of the library managers with a number of new updates.

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What did we focus on?

• Some clients requested an option not to show the company library in the explore asset view as it was irrelevant for them, so now as manager are able to enable or disable the use of the company library
• Difficult to move assets and associate labels across libraries but now, all assets and their associated labels can be transferred across libraries with just one click
• We have improved the delete slide experience
• Managers can now merge multiple tags into one via the "tags" manager view. And, if tags are merged the associated assets are automatically transferred to the selected primary tag​

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To see it in action, watch the video below:

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Plans for the second quarter of 2024‍

In 2024, we would also like to focus more on sales and marketing related features, so in Q2 we want to further help users to increase proposal win-rates with:

• A presenter role for users who do not need to build many slides - for a simplified user experience e.g. sales oriented colleagues who rarely build proposals
• Building a proposal wizard to further streamline the slide deck creation process
• Improved placeholder feature -to make it more powerful and less time-consuming by combining it with the file validation

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Our way of AI Implementation to improve end-user experience

During the webinar we also touched upon the possibilities we see for the implementation of AI to further improve your experience. SlideHub sees AI as an opportunity to really support our existing product vision and value proposition.

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• Implementing AI could help library managers by:
  • Making it less time-consuming to organize a solid library
  • Helping suggest improvements and gaps in the current library
• Few specific examples of how we plan to help managers and eliminate the most time-consuming parts of managing the library and improve the content with AI:
  • Enhance the tagging system to identify synonymous / aliases for library assets
  • Automate the categorization of slides
  • Help prioritize the highest impact improvements to the library (using search terms and download stats)
  • Enhance the performance of existing "similar slides" logic

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• As for end-users, it could empower them to:
  • Get more value from the assets
  • Benefit even more from an improved library feature
• Some more specific examples of how we plan to provide even more value to end-users with the use of AI:
  • A feature to build presentations using slides and assets from SlideHub
  • Further improve the relevance of search results
  • Identify slides related to the active content that relates to the presentation in question
  • Enhance the ability to leverage inspiration slides based on content provided by users

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Moreover, currently we have integrations with SharePoint which enables you to sync your SlideHub library content to your SharePoint, and you can directly access the platform via PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook and even web browser. Over time, we also plan to further enable other tools to leverage the content within the slide library - meaning possible integrations with for example SalesForce and HubSpot.

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Keep up-to-date with the latest product updates

Your support and feedback really helps us to keep working hard to further improve the user experience and to maximize our platform’s benefit to you. We already have some cool features in the work for Quarter 2– and we can’t wait for you to see it! Don’t miss out and sign up for our next product webinar or subscribe to our product newsletter.

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We look forward to seeing you there!

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Watch the whole recording of the webinar here: Q1 Product Webinar- 2024

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Are you interested in becoming a client - Schedule a demo here

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Do you need our assistance as a clients - Book a call with Customer Success