Template management: Overkill or a real time saver?

Does template management sound like overkill to you? Why bother defining a process for something that basically is merely a matter of uploading new versions of an existing Word or PowerPoint template? The answer is simple: Your employees won't use the new version just because you copy it to a file share.

You have to reach a bit deeper into your box of tricks.
Automated template management involves a huge time-saving benefit, allowing you to deploy any number of customized Office templates to thousands of employees at one swoop. Let me show you how much time, effort, and IT resources you can save with a simple template management process put in place.

Template management and brand compliance go hand in hand. Learn more from our free Template Management guide:

Deploying Office templates the good old way: Time eater or time saver?

With tech innovations and developments coming fast these days, you might think everything used to be a whole lot easier for IT some decades ago. That’s not exactly true. At least as far as the deployment of Office templates for a large workforce in global organizations is concerned. Here’s why:

As an IT expert, you know the ropes. To roll out Office templates and updates, you either place them in a shared folder on a network drive or copy them directly to the user PC.

In theory, this is pretty much all there is to it. In practice, there is a but.

While the approach seems perfectly plausible, it bears three unpredictable time factors, putting your template deployment on shaky legs:

1. As your Office templates can only be distributed when employees actively log into the corporate network, it is nearly impossible to predict when an employee will download the new Office template and put it to use – even more so in today’s world of wherever, whenever workstyles.
2. In a global organization, you need to factor in different time zones – with employees working in offices scattered worldwide, the odds are your deployment timeline blows up even further, thus becoming annoyingly lengthy.
3. Without logging the actual file copy to the user PC, you lose track of which employees have actually gotten the new Office templates and are already using it, ultimately pushing template deployment beyond your control.

Learn everything about effective Template Management from our free guide:

The benefits of template management

The technical challenges of template deployment alone can quickly use up IT resources. Yet, the human factor may be the most challenging time waster for IT and a CMO seeking to deploy Office templates to employees promptly.

Here is a typical scenario.

Matt from Marketing needs Susan from IT to take over the deployment of a number of new PowerPoint templates and prioritize the process. Between her many other tasks, Susan needs to find time to properly test the new templates and update existing ones, maintain data sources along with image and text libraries, and finally deploy the new templates to the entire organization. Obviously, this manual approach to template distribution eats away a huge amount of Matt’s and Susan’s time.

Sounds familiar, right?

Automating custom template deployment is just the trick you need to reduce time-consuming template administration efforts in IT (and wait time for Marketing) down to zero. With a simple process put in place, Matt can easily keep things on hand, allowing him to instantly release new Office templates to thousands of employees whenever needed.

This is exactly what Templafy does.

The magic of dynamic template management

Automating template deployment is just the trick you need to reduce time-consuming template administration efforts in IT (and wait time for Marketing) down to zero. With a simple process put in place, Steven can easily keep things on hand, allowing him to instantly release new Office templates to thousands of employees whenever needed.
As change is constant in business, even organizations with a good data structure to support their templates will regularly find that content is outdated.

A dynamic template management system like Templafy makes it easy to address change and roll out updates to the whole company instantly. Everything is handled through the intuitive Templafy web interface and available online. The need for IT involvement is removed, and all templates, documents and content assets are accessible locally or through the cloud.

Better yet, Templafy integrates with the productivity suites used by companies every day, so all your custom company templates, brand assets and best practice content are available directly inside any Office application – whether that’s Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Apple iWork, Google Docs, etc. – streamlining how users build or rebuild files. It‘s available on all platforms and devices too, ensuring businesses are on-brand and users create professional documents faster. Learn more from our short video introducing the main benefits of Templafy: