Tjool: Conversation with Sonja Van Halder

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Sonja Van Halder from Tjool has years of experience in sales and marketing for shareware and software. She’s been part of several European and US shareware conferences. In her present role at Tjool, Sonja interacts with PowerPoint users.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and Tjool.

Sonja: Tjool is a company based in the south of Germany near Stuttgart. We work with clients worldwide and offer tools in both English and German. We provide add-ins and tools to PowerPoint users. In the past, we developed customized solutions and add-ins for customers and enterprise businesses. We realized during our consultancy services to our partners and customers that tens of thousands of PowerPoint presentations are saved on customer’s sites — and employees were still using different slides with different styles or old masters in their presentation — or their slides contained wrong information, such as out-of-date revenue figures, numbers, etc.

We first developed a web-based presentation management tool (Tjool) for enterprise customers, which is being used to organize and manage their slides and presentations in an indexed server database. This allows their employees to access the presentations anytime, and from anywhere — or to pick the desired presentation and generate a new one based on a template using the corporate design of the company. Over a couple of years, several small and enterprise companies found this solution very practical and useful to manage their slides, maintain a unified look, and provide up-to-date information in their presentations.

We felt the need to provide Tjool as a single-user license compared to a web-based solution. Users needed an add-in tool to PowerPoint, to be used by the sales or marketing departments — and therefore a small number of users between 2 to 30 will use the Tjool — PowerPoint Manager. Therefore, we developed Tjool as a single-user license with a local database or network repository.

The user interface of Tjool comprises 4 parts:

1. Search
2. List of Presentations
3. Categories
4. Slides Overview

Geetesh: How is Tjool different from other presentation optimizer programs, and do you plan to make Tjool compatible with PowerPoint 2007?

Sonja: Tjool indexes all words in the scanned presentations and categories, in the slides, diagrams, and within the objects to make it easy for the users to find the desired slide. The search function of Tjool goes further than the Microsoft search function in PowerPoint. In comparison to other tools, Tjool is available in 3 editions:

1. Single-user license for laptop users or one-person use,
2. Network edition for a team to use the same database and presentations, and
3. A web-based management edition for external users or for all employees.

The customer can decide which edition fulfills his requirements. In addition, Tjool offers the creation of virtual presentations. Virtual presentations mean that the user will be able to build up their own presentations based on slides from other presentations and Tjool will keep these virtual presentations automatically up-to-date. This means if slide 7 in a presentation XYZ was changed and this slide is linked to a virtual presentation, then this will be automatically changed for the user who generated this virtual presentation.

The number of users of PowerPoint 2007 is increasing from day to day. We are expecting the new release of Tjool to be released either at the end of third quarter or at the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. We are glad that Microsoft released PowerPoint 2007’s file format based on XML — as this will allow the scanning function of presentations in Tjool to perform faster.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.