Central Cloud Location

Amazingly, in this era of ubiquitous cloud computing, most companies don’t have a central cloud repository of presentation slides. Slides get stored everywhere. Individuals keep decks on their laptops. Some groups might share a Google Drive or dump presentations into a shared Dropbox account. Some companies used SharePoint’s Slide Library, which has been discontinued. But whether we’re talking about a small business or a Fortune 500 corporation, it’s rare to find a single, organized, sophisticated cloud solution for presentations.

It might seem obvious, but if slides are scattered in all sorts of pockets of storage, they can’t be shared, reused, and monitored for compliance and consistency. The only way to get this party started is to get all presentations into one place in one location, preferably a cloud drive that anyone with permission can access.

So, step one: Establish or buy (from us!) a central presentation repository and upload all of the company’s presentation files. Remember, these files are not limited to PowerPoint, they could include video, images, brochure PDFs, etc. When we refer to presentation files in this book, we are talking about anything that can be presented.

Step two: Make this library accessible to everyone in your organization with the proper permissions. Permissions are important because they direct users to the content that they need, and they help manage risk and ensure compliance.

Step three: Dedicate a person or group to guide presentation strategy and direction. The presentation directors are responsible for ensuring that the presentation management strategy is planned and implemented in your company. Think of it like an advertising director who is responsible for all of the development, execution and measurement of the company’s advertising, or an event manager who is responsible for selecting the conferences and ensuring that the right employees are attending with the right collateral. We’ll go deeper into what skill set a director of presentation management should have in the next chapter. But for now, our point is that someone in the company should own the presentation strategy.