SAVO Innovates with Open XML

SAVO, a Sales Enablement company based in Chicago, Illinois, provides a tool that enables collaboration on PowerPoint presentations for sales. Using SAVO’s tool, sales professionals can generate custom sales presentations that are tailored to a specific customer and the customer’s vertical market. The Software as a Service product is deployed to more than 100 organizations with over 150,000 users. Prior to Open XML, they were using a proprietary library to generate PowerPoint presentations in the older binary format, but the proprietary library didn’t offer the flexibility that they needed. They saw the possibilities of Open XML, and embarked on a project to generate Open XML documents in addition to binary ones. Their implementation, which uses the Open XML SDK, is pretty cool and really highlights some of the advantages that Open XML brings to us.

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Blog TOCAs I mentioned, one of SAVO’s most widely used features allows users to dynamically customize PowerPoint presentations. When using this functionality, marketing administrators can upload an approved PowerPoint deck into their system and set preferences determining how it should be used. The sales users can then customize the sales asset for each unique sales situation before downloading. Users can sort slides online and mix and match slides from multiple Open XML presentations. Administrators can set rules that lock in or remove certain slides as necessary for the current selling situation. In addition, their system can require that the user answer a few questions, and their system will customize the slides accordingly.

Here’s a screen clipping of their application where they can search for slides, then drag and drop slides to their new presentation:

The user then answers questions on each slide. Based on these responses, text replacements may be made on individual slides in accordance with the user’s responses:

Finally, the completed deck is generated and available for download or to email directly to prospective clients.

“Working with Open XML has opened up the possibilities for customization of documents,” said Kelly Stuard, one of the SAVO developers on the project. “Before, we were limited by the third-party’s ability to modify proprietary, binary office documents. Now we can not only make the changes in an open and supported way; but, also verify the changes by looking directly at the underlying XML. This allows us to perform more complicated changes based on the business needs of our clients.”

This is a great application of Open XML.