Geetesh: |
Tell us more about yourself and SkabelonDesign. |
Christian: |
SkabelonDesign is a Copenhagen
(Denmark) based company with
offices in Atlanta (US), London
(UK), Lyon (France) and Madrid
(Spain).
SkabelonDesign develops templates and solutions
for PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Outlook. Our primary objective
is to operationalize the use of visual identity in corporate
communication within the Microsoft Office applications. Our
customers benefits are efficiency, consistency and a life-to-the-brand
brand within the everyday programs used by staffs on a daily
basis. I’m Partner and Managing Director of the company.
I’m responsible for all our international activities
and work in close relation with our customers, distributors
and strategic partners across the globe.
|
Geetesh:
|
Tell us about your brand consistency products for
Microsoft Office |
Christian: |
Looking at how brands are controlled in different channels,
it is clear that almost all branding areas are completely
controlled and maintained by a very small group of people
at corporate level. This goes for e.g. websites, TV-ads,
print, direct marketing, sponsorships, etc. But when it comes
to Microsoft Office, the brand control leaves this exclusive
group and enter the hands of vast numbers of employees in
the companies – very often creating what we call ‘Brand
Anarchy’. Our value proposition is dual. We focus on
streamlining visual identity in the everyday life of
the corporate user and on top our tools add significant productivity
wins to all business processes involving the Microsoft Office
applications. We supply tools for managing visual identity
in Microsoft Office, and thereby achieve an unmistakable and
uniform communication. We see management of visual identity
as a substantial element of corporate communication.
It emphasizes corporate profile and ensures that investment
in visual identity pays off. SkabelonDesign helps organizations – usually
in co-operation with those in charge of design, communication
and marketing – streamline their visual identity. With
our solutions we embed corporate visual identity in
all internal and external communication done via Microsoft
Office.
|
Geetesh: |
One aspect of your PresentationEngine product is that
it has been designed from the ground up with the presentation
designer in mind – how did this aspect evolve, and what
sort of research did this entail. |
Christian: |
All the members of the SkabelonDesign team are experienced
PowerPoint experts. We love PowerPoint and see great value
of constantly pushing the limit of what PowerPoint can do.
However, in the area concerning usage of PowerPoint as a
tool for streamlining corporate branding we experienced that
PowerPoint itself did not live up to the requests that we
continuously received from our customers. In 2003 we engaged
with the Corporate Brand Director of Carlsberg Breweries
and a number of other large corporations on a development
project that had the primary objective to create a tool for
PowerPoint that would significantly enhance brand control,
best practice sharing and productivity in the everyday work
with PowerPoint. This project evolved into version 1.0 of
SD PresentationEngine - a product that in the current version
2.10.16 is used by almost 300,000 users across the globe.
As with all our development SD PresentationEngine is customer
driven and we’re constantly on the lookout for finding
and solving generic corporate challenges in the work with
PowerPoint.
In PowerPoint 2007 we’ve obviously been
blessed with a lot of new opportunities. Especially all the
new design features significantly boost the opportunities
compared to what we were able to do in PowerPoint 2003. But
the new opportunities in PowerPoint 2007 have at the same
time introduced a ‘jungle’ of one-click-away
design features that makes it hard for the average user to
navigate and produce presentations within the boundaries
of a given corporate visual identity. And hence almost impossible
for the corporate brand ambassadors to control the brand
in PowerPoint. This is one of the main focus areas that we’re
currently solving in close relation with our customers.
|
Geetesh:
|
There are two aspects of PresentationEngine: one
is the actual product, and the other is the actual customization
and branding – can you explain more about the latter,
and how you help clients with that aspect. |
Christian: |
SD PresentationEngine is a standard software that is customized
to fit the needs of our customers. We strive to keep the
configuration and customer maintenance as simple as possible
in order to give our customers the option of taking complete
control of the product within the company. In other words
our customers don’t need us to build their PresentationEngine.
This has shown to be very successful and a large number of
our customers are currently self-running. We do however very
often serve as advisors on how to manage branding within
PowerPoint and on what kind of PowerPoint material organizations
need in order to share and rapidly produce presentations
according to visual guidelines. Also we have a large number
of strategic partners that work within development of corporate
visual identity. These are design agencies or advertising
agencies. Our typical implementation process is 3-legged
and involves a close communication between design agency,
customer, and SkabelonDesign. Our customers and strategic
partners see us as bridge-builders between brand development
and brand usability within e.g. PowerPoint.
|
Geetesh: |
PresentationEngine is a product that’s aimed
at the enterprise level of business. Do you have any plans
of making it accessible to small and medium business sectors? |
Christian: |
Actually yes. SD PresentationEngine in its current form is
definitely very much a value adding product for enterprises
with huge problems within brand control and with substantial
productivity potential. The larger the company, the bigger
the challenge. We do however already have a lot of customers
in the small and medium sectors. Many of these run Light
versions of SD PresentationEngine. Companies or departments
that deliver professional services basically experience the
same problems regardless of the size of the company or department
and hence our customer segment is wide spread in size and
branches. Also, were planning to launch a number generic
single-user versions of SD PresentationEngine during the
course of 2008.
|
Geetesh:
|
Can you share some case studies for PresentationEngine – even
if you don’t provide actual names of the clients. |
Christian: |
SkabelonDesign help hundreds of companies across the world
controlling their brand and enhancing productivity in PowerPoint.
Our customers vary a lot in size and type and also it is
very different how their favorite features list in SD PresentationEngine
is composed. Some emphasize the strong knowledge sharing
facilities. Others point out their time savings on the unique
image handling features. And some point out the integration
facilities between Excel and PowerPoint and the embedded
brand formatting tools as the most substantial win with SD
PresentationEngine. For specific customer cases I recommend
the readers of this article to contact our local offices.
|
Geetesh: |
Do you want to share any trivia – an
unconventional use of your products, or a message that you
want to provide to Indezine readers? |
Christian: |
Yes. Among many I would like to point out one in particular.
We’ve experienced an interesting development of the
perception of PowerPoint among our strategic partners in
the design development business. The designers are used to
working with the Adobe Creative Suite programs (Illustrator,
PhotoShop etc.) that obviously provides tremendous opportunities
and almost unlimited flexibility in the design process. In
a historical perspective the designers have seen PowerPoint
as an unavoidable and very limiting barrier to creativity
that they’ve constantly be confronted with when delivering
corporate visual identities to their customers. It has been
an almost impossible task for them to implement advanced
designs in the Microsoft Office applications. What we’ve
seen with especially the introduction of SD PresentationEngine
for PowerPoint is that designers feel confident creating
advanced designs without worrying about how the designs will
be implemented and used by the end-user in PowerPoint. Furthermore
we’ve experienced that the designers even invite PowerPoint
and SD PresentationEngine to the design process and often
prefer to do designs directly in PowerPoint with the added
flexibility that SD presentationEngine provides. This development
is perhaps the best example of how we at SkabelonDesign see
ourself as bridge builders between design development, implementation
and usage.
ScreenDumps:
 SD
DesignToolbar™ ensures fast production of PowerPoint
slides and integration from Microsoft Excel.
SD SlideShopper enables you to compile a presentation by shopping
for Best Practice slides from other presentations.
Link to 3 minute SD PresentationEngine demo video:
http://www.skabelondesign.com/Downloads/Skabelon
Design/
WebDemos/SDPE2007/SDPEppt2007.html
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