Zinali slideboxx: Conversation with Charles Wolfus

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For almost a decade, Charles Wolfus has worked closely with scientists and executives finding ways to increase efficiency and optimize IT systems. For the past few years, he has been co-founder and CEO of Zinali, LLC, a San Francisco-based company dedicated to improving PowerPoint slide search. In this conversation, Charles talks about their slideboxx product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about slideboxx, and what it does.

Charles: slideboxx is a PowerPoint slide library. It automatically finds PowerPoint presentations and builds a library of your individual slides. With slideboxx installed, you never need to manually import a presentation or check it in to a server. You merely save it as you normally do, and slideboxx takes care of the slide management for you.

When you need to find slides, enter a simple text search and slideboxx quickly returns thumbnail images of your slides for fast recognition. You can then select slides to quickly build a new presentation, or insert them into an existing one; slideboxx takes care of all the copying and pasting.

Geetesh: With several slide management and cataloging tools out there, what is it that slideboxx does better? What are its strengths?

Charles: First, because organizing takes time, we believe you shouldn’t need to organize or actively manage your presentations. Instead, your system should make them searchable. Our number one goal with slideboxx is making your slide search fast and we incorporate compelling technologies to do this. But there is more to a good slide management tool than simply speed, which is why we are so obsessive about usability.

The deceptively simple, fluid slideboxx interface hides a lot of complexity. As a result, our user surveys and feedback consistently identify ease of use as a key advantage of slideboxx.

Getting back to speed: we’ve developed a patent pending search technology optimized for speedy and specific slide search. That may not impress those with a few hundred slides. But our customers with 20,000, 50,000, or more slides repeatedly tell us how surprisingly fast they are able to perform searches, see results, and find the slides they need.

Because slides (especially the good ones) are like pictures people recognize them instantly as images. So we present search results as individual slide thumbnails, rather than pointers to files containing the relevant slides. Faster recognition means you find your slides fast, and that’s what we’re all about.

Further we’ve included many features to optimize finding your slides. For example:

If you’re like me, you have 10, 20, or more versions of the same slide with very slight changes. We know looking through all these can be slow and cumbersome. The redundant slides also get in the way of seeing other slides you may need. Using the slideboxx proprietary Slide Clustering technology you can hide derivatives of a slide, quickly jumping to the right slide.

We’ve also considered the problem of grouping slides (from different presentations) and customizing search results. With the slideboxx Slide Tagging feature you can label slides with custom searchable text so you can easily define special sets of slides or ensure particular slides show up in a search. It also allows for faster subsequent searches and speeds the search for image-based slides.

As you can see, we are very serious about saving time for PowerPoint users and making slideboxx easy to use. These are just two of the ways that slideboxx stands out among slide management tools.

slideboxx 2.0 is normally available online for only $119 USD. But to celebrate this exciting new release, during the month of April we are offering a special price of only $99.

You can learn more about slideboxx 2.0 by visiting the slideboxx slide management website, Facebook page, or Twitter page.

Categories: digital_asset_management, interviews, powerpoint, slide_management