The visual power of PowerPoint presentations makes them indispensable to effective business communications. But, many sets of slides fail to deliver the desired results. The shortcoming is partly due to limited productivity and lack of collaboration during the production process.

Office 365 collaboration capabilities have solved this problem.

With Office 365, it is easier to work on a document in collaboration with your colleagues anywhere, anytime. This is even more important when collaborating with team members located in different towns or countries.

Office 365 co-authoring features allow everyone in your team to work on a PowerPoint presentation simultaneously. You quickly and easily get feedback and input from your coworkers. Anyone can add, edit, or sign off on the final deliverable. As the changes are automatically synced back to the cloud, you see edits as they happen and you make corrections in real-time.

There is almost no benefit in sticking with the old ways of producing slides. Start with understanding the things you can do with the platform.

Explore the features you can incorporate into your processes

Many teams are still working together on PowerPoint presentations the stressful, frustrating, and time-consuming way: spending hours emailing the document back and forth among teammates; navigating threads of emails to keep track of changes; trying to find the teammate who has the latest copy; etc.

Using this messy and cumbersome process not only wastes a lot time but also, more alarmingly, limits the creative input of teammates.

There is an easier way to quickly improve collaboration and boost productivity on all your PowerPoint projects: use Office 365. The Platform enables your team to work together seamlessly, regardless of location or time of the day.

However, first, your team needs to master the steps.

To help your team quickly learn the steps and sustainably adopt the platform, leverage the power of VisualSP context-sensitive help items and walk-thrus.

The paragraphs below explain what the process looks like and how to make sure that end users actually use them.

Help your team know how to use the Office 365 collaboration features

You and your team can work on slides using Android phones, iOS devices, or tablets. The device that you use to edit the document doesn't need to have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on it. If you can open a browser, you can make changes to a document. Once the document is open in the browser, you can quickly see who is currently working on it. You can also see all the changes that are being made in real-time; and, they are all saved automatically.

The process is simple.

• Save the presentation to OneDrive for Business using a desktop computer or a tablet.
• Edit the presentation anytime at home or during a commute, allowing you to contribute to the final draft even during after hours, when traveling, or out-of-office. The ability to work wherever you are is a net benefit to productivity.
• Share the presentation with your teammates using view-only or edit permissions.
• Open the presentation and see who is working on it. Use the integrated instant messaging from Skype for Business to chat about the changes, additions, and deletions being made. Easily include or exclude revisions, corrections, suggestions, and comments.
• When the final draft is produced, instantly notify the right people to obtain approval for the presentation.

This process works well but your team needs to know how to follow it. The same applies to custom processes you create for how other things get done.

Training can help create awareness about a platforms capabilities but it is not enough to ensure sustainable user adoption. This is due to the fact that people forget most of what they learn in classrooms within days. And training programs are too costly to be practical long-term.

To get everyone up to speed as fast as possible, here are some options:

• make use of out-the-box walk-thrus or video and pdf help items that follow users on every page of the Office 0365 applications interfaces;
• build custom walk-thrus to provide your teammates with step-by-step guidance through every step of the processes you create;
• use built-in analytics to see which help items have been viewed, by whom, and how many times;
• take new employees through your custom-built process to accelerate onboarding;
• and, have your IT team add  automatic alerts that remind everyone to follow the governance, data security, and regulatory compliance policies.

Using Office 365 for your PowerPoint presentations projects gives everyone in your team the ability to contribute regardless of device, location, or time of day. And, installing VisualSP ensures that Office 365 is actually used to the fullest extent, as intended, sustainably.

When barriers to collaboration are removed and friction to productivity is diminished, the quality of PowerPoint presentations that your teamwork produces can only get better; the slides you create can only get more informative, more engaging, and more persuasive.