One of the most powerful aspects of SlideRocket is the ability to easily collaborate with your colleagues. What could collaboration mean for you? Well, it means you never have to walk into a meeting again and be forced to utter these words: “Oh, I’m so sorry – looks like this is last quarter’s data.” It means you never have to search through gazillions of old presentations to find one slide you are looking for. It means if you change your logo, your message, your brand colors or just about anything about your organization, you can have your entire team up to date and on message instantly. It means no more emailing massive attachments and waiting for new drafts of your decks.

Pretty much, it means you will save time and money, your organization’s communications will be in sync, you will be able to solicit and receive feedback from your peers in real time, and you will be able to get the right message to the right audience at the right time. All of this, of course, will help you win new business (and look good while doing it!). In other words, it means presentation collaboration happiness.

As of today, we’re giving you 100% more happiness.  When you login to SlideRocket and go to any of your libraries (Presentations, Slides, Assets), you will now see two sets of folders and some set searches.  These folders are super cool, and here’s what you need to know about them:

My Private Folders

This section will contain content that can only be seen by you.  You can make new folders, and organize your private content however you like – you’re the only one who will see anything you keep in this area!

My Shared Folders

Now, this is where it gets fun.  If your company lets you, you can create folders in this area and assign permissions to the ENTIRE FOLDER.  That means anything you drag into that folder will automatically adopt those permissions. For example, I have created a “Marketing” folder. In this folder, I have given Nat Robinson and Mitch Grasso edit permissions. Now, when I have created a bunch of new Marketing presentations, instead of having to go through each one to give Nat and Mitch permission to edit them, I can just drag it into the Marketing folder and, voila! They can now see those presentations when they click on the Marketing folder in their accounts, and they can edit away.

Here’s what’s cool – you only see the folders you have permissions on. That way, SlideRocket does its part to help keep your presentation workspace clutter free!

Now, what if I have a presentation that I want to put in the Marketing folder, but I also want to share it with Brian Hollinger, who heads up our Inside Sales? No problem! I have a few options:

1. I can add Brian to the Marketing folder, and give him either read-only or edit permissions, which means he will see everything in the Marketing folder
2. I can highlight the item and click the “Share” icon if it is a presentation, or “Edit Permissions” on the right if it is a slide or asset, and add Brian
3. I can right-click on the item, click “Share,” and add Brian that way.

As you can see, the first option has broader implications.  Brian will now have permission to at least view, if not edit, everything in the Marketing folder. If you don’t want this to happen, but you want him to see this one thing, your best bet is to use option two or three.

You may also have a situation where a particular item doesn’t fall neatly into a folder, but you want to share it with certain individuals. You can do that too! You’ll notice two special folder types with brackets around them at the top of your “Shared Folders” section: “My Shared Items” and “User Shared Folders.” These are bracketed because they don’t behave the same way as the other folders. You can’t delete them, change permissions on them, and you can’t move them.  But, they come in super handy for the problem you are trying to solve. In order to share something with specific individuals without creating a separate folder, you simply need to follow these two steps:

1. Drag the folder or item in question into the “My Shared Items” folder
2. Follow options 2 or 3 above to share that item with specific people

So, if I have a presentation that I want to share with just Mitch, once I follow the steps above, something super cool happens. When Mitch logs in, he will now see a “Tracy Frey” folder under his “User Shared Folders,” and low and behold, when he clicks on that folder, he will see the presentation I have shared with him. Pretty sweet, huh?

A couple of things to be aware of when playing with our new folders:

• Just like on your desktop, you can’t have an item in two places – once you move something, it lives where you put it
• Feel free to drag folders as well as items – also just like you would on your desktop!
• If you drag an item or folder from your “Shared Folders” section into your “Private Folders” section, it will remove all the permissions that previously existed on that item or folder.  Please think carefully about whether you want this to happen
• If you are looking for something in particular, don’t know it’s exact name to put in the search box, and don’t want to hunt through bunches of folders, you can use the set “Searches” on the bottom of the left rail to look for stuff – the same way you’ve been doing this in SlideRocket up until now
• You can still tag anything you want! You’ll see tags in the set “Searches” area, and you can add tags there and tag away to your heart’s content. Tags function exactly the same as they always have.

That’s the basics about how our new folders work. We will have some thorough documentation about folders up very soon (Thanks Tara!). In the meantime, please play around with the new folders, and let us know what your feedback in the comments.  We believe folders will take your organization’s presentation collaboration to the next level, and of course we look forward to hearing what you think.

We have some other new features we just released as well – more info on those in a bit, so stay tuned!