by Bob Befus
Before launching SlideSource.com, I spent more than 30,000 hours in meeting rooms working with teams from some of the top pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies as they struggled to prepare for high profile regulatory presentations. In that amount of time I could have walked across America six times (that’s about 30,000,000 steps).
I say the teams I have worked with have “struggled” because whenever a team needs to collaborate on an important presentation, there are significant challenges. These can be lumped into the broad categories of strategic challenges (what to say and how to say it) and tactical challenges (how to manage the process in a way that lets the team effectively focus on strategy).
The setting for these presentations has been U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee meetings (AdComms). For companies developing drugs, biologics or medical devices, the stakes at AdComms couldn’t be higher. At these meetings, a team of experts is convened to advise the FDA on matters related to the effectiveness and safety of the product. Our clients will typically make a 60 to 90 minute presentation, and then must be prepared to answer any question the advisory committee might have about any aspect of the product’s development.
Getting ready for this meeting involves three to six months of preparation by teams of 15 or 20 in a small company, or 120 or more individuals in a large global enterprise. This means:
- Hundreds of different versions of the primary presentation are created
- Globally dispersed teams must collaborate to anticipate questions and prepare thousands of data slides to help answer those questions
- Tracking 1,500 versions of a 120-slide presentation and developing 2,000 to 5,000 individual backup slides
- Organizing, editing (with version control) and quality-checking slides to find the exact one(s) needed in less than five seconds at the AdComms
- Slide organization, collaboration and presentation can be a nightmare
At the end of AdComms, committee members vote on the benefit-risk ratio of the product. A positive vote means the benefits of the product outweigh the risks and the FDA will most likely end up approving the product for sale in the U.S. —a positive vote could mean the launch of a multi-billion dollar per year product, or a negative vote could mean the death of a biotech startup.
Building Out of Necessity
Over the years we began to develop customized tools to help ourselves and our client collaborate and organize all of their presentation content. We started by using a process built around a product called Groove, which Microsoft eventually bought and is now part of SharePoint. After SharePoint 2007 was released, we worked with the SharePoint slide library tool that came with SharePoint. As anyone who has tried to use the SharePoint slide library knows, it was a very flawed solution from the beginning. We eventually wrote our own SharePoint workflows and event handlers to make the slide library more usable. While these improvements helped some, in order to help our clients manage their presentation challenges, we eventually rewrote the slide library in SharePoint from the ground up and called it SlideSource SPTM.
SlideSource SP is a unique and powerful slide and presentation library tool that runs on the SharePoint platform. SlideSource SP was a game changer for clients using SharePoint in their organizations. Managing presentations and thousands of slides became much more convenient. It has now been used by most major pharmaceutical companies in the world. Some use it in the regulatory presentation setting, while others use it in medical affairs or clinical settings. A typical SlideSource library for these clients includes almost 6,000 slides across numerous products and indications.
Early in 2014, one of our development programmers who had worked extensively on SlideSource SP asked a simple question that set us in a new direction. “Had we ever thought of bringing SlideSource out of SharePoint to a stand-alone web service?”
We hadn’t … but we started to.
Preparing for Launch
In June 2014, we initiated the development of SlideSource.com. Built on the same premise as the SharePoint version, our developers were no longer constrained by the limitations of the SharePoint platform. We brought everything we learned from years of managing giant, complex slide libraries to SlideSource.com. Unlike some developers, we actually use our own tools day in and day out, which gave us unique insights into how an online slide library should work. Our primary goal was to maintain all the powerful slide and presentation management features of the original SharePoint tool, but to make it even more intuitive and easy to use. The end result is really quite exceptional.
SlideSource.com has unique features designed to support any level of PowerPoint presentation management. Its simple drag and drop interface makes uploading and organizing slides and presentations a breeze. You can edit your slides in PowerPoint right from the site and version control is automatic.
Because of its pedigree in helping teams manage the process of developing thousands of slides, SlideSource.com has unique collaboration features that take the nightmare out of the process, especially for teams that are globally distributed. With SlideSource.com, users can download slides or presentations, edit them and then re-upload them to the library without breaking the version history chain. Individual slides in a presentation can be stored and edited by different team members while the presentation itself always reflects the most up-to-date version of each team member’s slides.
SlideSource.com was introduced as a public beta in October 2014 at the Presentation Summit in San Diego.
You could say SlideSource.com has been in development since June of 1996, when we helped our first customer build an FDA AdComm presentation. After a successful public beta in October 2014, SlideSource.com is fully launched and live.
We hope you enjoy and benefit from the result of our journey.
The Story of SlideSource.com
It took 30 Million Steps to Get Here
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