Slide Executive Professional

Introduction

A decade or two ago, users played with PowerPoint around twice a month, made some overhead slides through a service provider and hired expensive equipment to show these at really big events. Nowadays, people create PowerPoint slides more often than they sneeze!

The result is that there are billions of slides in the presentation sphere. Slides lost and mixed up in a chaotic land where it's easier to spend a few hours to create new slides than search and reuse the ones that cannot be found. Our review product Slide Executive Professional may be all the help you need. Read on to learn more.

About Slide Executive Professional

Slide Executive Professional is from Novatrox AB, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Novatrox was founded in 2000 -- you'll find more information about their products and the company at the Slide Executive web site (link no longer exists).

Unlike Slide Executive Desktop, which we have reviewed in the past, Slide Executive Professional is an online service comprising a web based slide library and document management system that enables a subscriber to store presentation content in a single slide library, from were you can access and search for the presentation or slides you require. Subscribers can search and select needed slides and then simply download them as new presentations. The system supports all types of documents.

The following are some of the key feature of the product:

My contact at Novatrox for this review was Liber Rodriguez - thank you, Liber.

Using Slide Executive Professional

Slide Executive Professional is not available for download. You first need to register as a user (subscriber) -- alternatively you can request a free trial of the service.

Follow these steps to use Slide Executive Professional:

1. Browse to the site, and login to your account (see Figure 1).
2. 
   Figure 1: Slide Executive Pro Login
2. This opens the Slide Executive Pro interface, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Slide Executive Pro interface
4. The interface is divided into four areas.
5. A. Public Library panel which is located on the left side of the interface, here you will find presentations uploaded by other users -- and My Library which contains presentation uploaded by you.
6. B. Toolbar area that contains icons representing the slide basket, thumbnail sizes, print, search, logout, import, export, delete, etc.
7. C. Exactly at the bottom of the Public Library panel on the left, you'll find View, Tools and Administration (see Figure 3) options (click them to expand) where you can change the global settings of the application, view the updates, etc.
8. 
   Figure 3: More options
9. D. The area at the right side of the interface changes depending upon the other choices you make. It is the work area, and displays the options you select., or the thumbnails of the slides or other documents.
3. Within the Public Library panel click the My Library option; this displays the library items on the right side of the interface as shown in Figure 4.
4. 
   Figure 4: My Library
4. Now click the Import File option in the toolbar area (refer to Figure 4 above).
5. This opens the Import dialog box. Here you can browse and import a presentation from your hard disk into My Library (see Figure 5).
6. 
   Figure 5: Import a presentation (or another file)
7. Provide a presentation name, description, date, language, etc. as required and click Import.
6. This will start uploading the presentation to My Library as shown in Figure 6.
7. 
   Figure 6: Importing
8. Depending upon the presentation size and the online speed, the import process might take a while.
7. Now you can find the imported presentation in My Library (see Figure 7).
8. 
   Figure 7: Imported presentations
Note: If you are not able to see the imported presentation just refresh the Public Library panel. The red symbol in front of the imported presentation displays that the item is not yet viewed.
8. Click on the imported presentation to see its content as shown in Figure 8.
9. 
   Figure 8: Displaying content
9. To create a new presentation out of slides contained in the imported presentations (or the Library), just select or check the Include in slide basket checkbox above the thumbnails, as show in Figure 9.
10. 
    Figure 9: Slides added in slide basket
10. Now click the Slide basket icon in the toolbar area (see Figure 10).
11. 
    Figure 10: Slide basket icon
11. This will display slide basket content (as shown in Figure 11).
12. 
    Figure 11: Slide basket
13. Here you can save the content of the slide basket to a new presentation by clicking Export.
12. This opens the Export dialog box (see Figure 12).
13. 
    Figure 12: Export Options
14. Export option includes:
15. File properties: Here you can provide name, description, subject, slide type and save as type to the presentation.
16. Save as type includes the Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 as well.
17. Images and movies allows you to set the size of images and movies.
18. Templates: Here you can choose: templates to be applied, or not to be applied in the output presentation.
19. Once done click the Export button.
20. The export process will start, as shown in Figure 13.
21. 
    Figure 13: Exporting
13. You can find the exported presentation in the My Jobs (see Figure 14). To get to the My Jobs screen, click the arrow next to the Tools option in the Property pane, and click on My Jobs.
14. 
    Figure 14: Exported presentation
15. Click on the link (refer to Figure 14 above), to get the File Download window as shown in Figure 15.
16. 
    Figure 15: Save presentation
17. Download and save the presentation.

Search Options

Slide Executive provides a thorough search that lets you look through the entire public tree (Public Library) -- you can search by title, content, notes, keywords, presenter, dates, etc. You can also search in individual parts of the public tree by right clicking on the directory, or the whole tree from the menu on the left. No options are available to search the personal tree (My Library) as of now.

Here's a quick walkthrough:

1. Click the Search option under Tools, right under the Public Library panel (refer to Figure 3 above). This brings up the Search dialog box. Here, click the Advanced Search tab to view the options that you can see in Figure 16.
2. 
   Figure 16: Search
2. Add one or more search terms in the fields -- such as name, description, keywords, slide title, slide text, etc. and press the Search button.
3. This will bring up the relevant results (see Figure 17) -- you'll notice that each result includes an option to select it as destined for the slide basket.
4. 
   Figure 17: Search results
4. Once these slides (or other documents) are in the slide basket, you proceed in the same way as you would have done to export the slide basket to an exported presentation.

Pricing and Support

The base price for the server component package of SlideExecitive Professional composed of the Indexing Server, Web Server and Bulk Importer is: € 3990 or approximately $ 5860.

And € 70 per user license ($ 103), with discounts starting from 5% for 11-20 users, 10% for 21-30 users and 15 % for more than 30 users.

Support is through e-mail or phone. The phone support are open during business hours 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Central European Time(CET), Monday - Friday. There is also a online FAQ where you can find answers for the most common questions about the product.

Conclusion

SlideExecutive Professional is a comprehensive slide management solution that benefits from a great interface and well conceived options. The software is priced on a scale that is aimed for enterprise and larger organizations.