Validator for PowerPoint slides (tech)

What is Validator?

Templafy's Document Content Validator (Validator) is a feature that makes it possible for companies to ensure that slides in presentations are up to date, even after a presentation has been downloaded by a user, saved locally on their desktop, and opened at a later date for re-use.

This article explains how Validator works for VSTO add-in versions earlier than 5.7.5.1909. If you're running on add-in version 5.7.5.1909 or above, Validator has added functionality which is explained further in the article: Validator with dynamics 1.11. 

How does it work from a user/admin perspective?

1. An admin enables validation (Validator) for one or more slides in a presentation stored in the Presentation Library or the Slide Library.
2. When a user downloads this presentation, all slides marked for validation are locked to prevent the user from editing the content on the slide.
3. The user then saves the presentation to their desktop.
4. At a later date, an admin may upload a new version of the presentation.
5. If the user re-opens the presentation that they had saved locally, they will be met by a notification that the presentation has been updated, and taken through a flow where they can decide whether to accept the updated version. 

How does it work from a technical perspective?

If Validator has been enabled on a Templafy tenant and a user opens a presentation that has Dynamics enabled, Templafy will run a check in the background to see if any updates have been made to slides enabled for validation.

If updates have been made, all the updated slides will be downloaded to the user's PC, and the user will have the option to update the presentation with the latest slides.

The presentation originally saved by the user does not return to Templafy at any stage.

The first version of Validator

The first version of Validator is for slides only. This means that all slides marked for validation will be checked if they are still in the presentation.

Validator was released on October 10th, 2018. Presentations uploaded to Templafy prior to this date must be re-uploaded before Validator can be enabled on them.

Validator only checks for updates made to individual slides in a presentation. It does not check to see if any slides have been added or deleted from a presentation.

Example 

Currently, this feature is for slides only, not whole presentations. For example, if all slides in a presentation containing 10 slides are Validator enabled, and the admin uploads a new version of the presentation with the following changes:

• 3 slides added
• 2 slides deleted
• 4 slides updated

Then only the 4 updated slides will be detected.

Pre-requisites:

• Validator enabled on Templafy tenant in settings (this must be done by Templafy or an Implementation Partner.)
• The presentation must be enabled for Dynamics.
• VSTO-add-in 5.5.1.1176.
• IMPORTANT: Validator only works for slides uploaded after Validator has been enabled.