Microsoft partners looking to add some incremental value to Microsoft Office
sales, take heed. Workshare has introduced Workshare Compare for PowerPoint,
software that tracks changes to Power Point presentations that have been edited
and reviewed by users besides the author.
It's a need that's on the rise. Workshare says that about 30 million PowerPoint
presentations are created each day, and are used for more purposes than ever
before. Often presentations are sent to others for revisions and review.
But the functionality for tracking such changes has largely been a missing
component.
And tracking these changes is becoming more important as the use of PowerPoint
rises in industries such as financial consulting, legal and sales, and PR and
marketing, says Matt Brown, vice president of product management at Workshare,
founded in 1999 to provide software for document comparisons, often to the
legal community. The company is now a Microsoft Gold Partner.
The client-side software needs to only be installed on the PowerPoint author’s
PC. When reviewed documents are returned to the author, the author can see a
side-by-side comparison of suggested changes to slides as well as suggested
changes for new slides, deleted slides or reordered slides.
“It can be challenging to see who is making the changes to PowerPoint
documents,” says Brown, who adds that companies are concerned with the
possibility of sending out the incorrect version of the documents.
In addition to providing a comparison view of the suggested changes, Workshare
Compare for PowerPoint can generate reports based on those changes, says Brown.
While the software does support embedded objects, it does not identify whether
a build has changed. In other words, it can tell the user that a change occurred
but not what that change is.
The stand-alone application has a look and feel designed around PowerPoint,
says Brown, and can be accessed from within PowerPoint itself.
Workshare has an alliance network of national and regional VARs as well as large
account resellers that include Insight and CDW, says Brown.
Pricing is set at $145 per user per year, on a subscription basis, and is
available starting this week, via download from the company’s Website, and also
through Workshare’s channel partners.
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Microsoft Partner 
