Folder Structure - Content Hierarchy
Getting the most out of your content starts with organization. To this end, best practices recommend spending a lot of time thinking about how to structure and name the folders you store content in. Remember, the last thing you want is for your employees to waste several hours searching for documents only to come up empty handed.
After you get started with presentation management and have assets on hand, it’s time to think about your content hierarchy. Generally speaking, there are two areas to focus on:
- Master content, which is used by everyone on the team
- Individual content, which is used by certain members of the team in certain situations
Robust presentation management solutions enable companies to create content hierarchies that make storing and sorting through content extremely intuitive while at the same time protecting the integrity of all digital assets.
Your presentation management solution should be designed to ensure brand, message and legal compliance from the very top level of your organization, while at the same time giving as much flexibility as possible to the sales-person out on the field. With that objective in mind, we recommend creating a “Global or Master” folder or set of folders with permissions to appropriate groups, and an “Individual” folder for each individual user.
Presentation management is customizable; never forget that you can and should do whatever works best for your organization.
Global Folders
Create one or many folders based on your business/product divisions and user groups. While you can create folders based on whatever subject matter and or whichever group you want, try to limit the number of folders you create to make it easier for users to track down the files they’re looking for.
Remember:
- The more folders you have, the more your employees will have to “dig” to find a slide or file.
- With search, your employees will be able to find the slide they are looking for regardless of which folder it’s in.
My Presentations Folder
There are two reasons for giving users a My Presentations folder where they are the only ones who have access and control:
It gives them their own workspace — a place to save their new presentations created from the library and add their own client specific content.
It protects the integrity of the Global Folders. They have their own folder, so they won’t be compelled to save files into the Global Folders thereby cluttering them for everyone else.
Folder Permissions
If you want to limit access to files to certain groups or individuals, create a folder for that content and assign permissions to those groups or individuals—and them alone.
When you want to give access to a folder to everyone, assign permissions to “All Users.”
You’ll quickly find out how easy it is to assign and revoke permissions. Gone are the days of relying on someone in IT to set permissions or worrying about unauthorized individuals accessing or altering your files.
