Template management: update and manage Office templates centrally

We’ve all been there: your company’s templates have been updated or redesigned and now you have to make the new versions available to all employees of the company. Or you need to update your own presentations to incorporate the new templates’ content or formatting. Especially during changeovers or internal restructuring, but also day-to-day, Office templates are used inconsistently. There’s no way for anyone to verify that everyone uses the most up-to-date version of documents. It’s even more confusing when a mistake in a template is discovered and yet another version is distributed.

What could happen if you don’t manage your Office templates centrally

If you don’t manage your Office templates centrally, people will create their own templates and use them in their day-to-day work. These DIY prototypes are often stored locally and used for a long time. If you distribute updated versions of your templates without central control, there’s no guarantee that everyone will adapt or replace their own stash of templates.

Even the best PowerPoint template tips won’t help if the content isn’t right. That’s how misinformation gets passed on to your clients. For example, inflation affects prices at most companies. If outdated prices are provided to your clients, that will cause confusion and significantly damage your brand if you must correct pricing after your clients have already been given a lower price.

Errors in company data on your letterhead or email signature can mean that responses don’t reach the right people. Incorrect IBAN numbers on invoices mean you don’t receive payments. And what about liability if legally required data is incorrect or missing entirely?

Your brand suffers if your company’s communications aren’t visually consistent. This can manifest itself through different fonts, colors, or logos. Lack of or inconsistent adherence to corporate design makes a company look unprofessional and chaotic. In a separate article, we summarize for you how to achieve consistent corporate design in Office.

Advantages of company-wide template management

You can counteract all these risks through central template management. Advantages of centralized management include the following:

External: up-to-date uniformity

• Your sales team always works with the latest presentations and can use them for their sales pitches.
• Thanks to brand-compliant templates, all your documents adhere to the corporate design.
• Customers always receive correct data in correspondence or offer letters. If something changes, the template can be adjusted company-wide, across all existing documents based on the template, with just a few clicks.
• The result: a strong brand through homogeneous appearance.

Internal: less effort

• With brand-compliant, predefined templates, people no longer need to spend time formatting their documents.
• No more time-consuming searches to find the current document or template, saving even more time and sparing everyone’s nerves.
• Automatic distribution of updates eliminates the need for manual updating.

We make company-wide management of your Office templates as easy as pie!

We at empower^® are Office experts. We’ve spent a lot of time researching the ideal solution for template management. Our empower^® Content Enablement solution provides a central library where all your digital content can be managed.

Make the latest templates always available directly in Microsoft Office. The empower^® Library integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office 365 and any user’s workflows. It provides direct access to all PowerPoint, Word, and Excel template content.

When users open an existing file, empower^® Content Enablement checks whether the content is still up-to-date. If it isn’t, the most current content is automatically made available.

Tedious searches for re-usable content become a thing of the past for you and your employees. empower^® Content Enablement indexes the locations where MS Office documents are stored. All Office templates can be found in a flash.

The empower^® Library also makes sharing new templates with your team members or company-wide easy.

Update templates company-wide with only 3 clicks!

The empower^® Library lets you enforce company-wide content. When you update a template, all documents based on that template get updated too. Here’s how easy it works:

On the empower^® tab, find the “Library” icon. Click the “Save” button next to the icon.

Now you can decide whether you want to save or update the entire presentation, the slide master, or the individual slide.

Lastly, you choose how you want to run the update. If you select “Share Update”, users will only be informed about the update. If you select “Force Update”, all documents in which this template has already been used will be updated automatically and without any further action required by users.

You can be sure that all your slides are always up to date and no outdated documents are used.

What other advantages does the empower^® Content Enablement solution offer?

In addition to simple template management, our Content Enablement solution offers the option of integrating existing applications such as DAM, PIM, and SharePoint. You can create a unified system and access all your content directly from Microsoft Office without changing platforms.

Another practical feature of the empower^® Library is security with editing rights. You decide who can change templates, who has admin rights, who has access to your templates, and who is not allowed to read them at all. So in addition to managing templates, you increase your in-house security standards and make content available only to people who are allowed to access it.

Learn more about Template Management with empower^® and contact us if you have any questions! Our experts are looking forward to finding the perfect template management solution for your company.