We work from the core belief that tools need to be linked to people and processes in order to be effective. Tim Mohler

Story Builder and Library Builder Digital Asset Management for Cisco Cisco's Marketing Department was struggling to enable the field sales force with presentations that were uniform in look and feel, in tune with marketing messages, customizable and easy to get to. The corporate document system was not focused on the problems of presentations, and in particular did not allow users to preview content, nor to choose chunks of content to self-assemble. The business challenge was to build a cost-effective system to ensure that presentations delivered to the field sales force: adhered to a set of standards designed to make them more valuable contained only current information did not duplicate what was currently available The technical challenge was to deliver a system that: Did not require any software on the end-user's machine Allowed for content preview and self-assembly Was quick and intuitive, even over slow connections The business challenges were met by meeting with various content providers inside of Cisco and persuading them of the business value of participating. A set of standards for the presentations was adopted, as well as a commitment from the content providers to refresh all presentations every 120 days. All product launches now include the production of presentations to these standards. The cost of managing this process was met by spreading it out over multiple business groups and amounts, for each unit, to less than they currently spend on graphics professionals for the presentations. The technical challenges were met by first processing the presentation into slides, and then using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) technology to essentially run a small application in the user's browser. Changing metadata selections results in near-instantaneous changing of the list of available presentations matching the new criteria. Each individual slide can be previewed by the user. Individual chunks of content can be assembled into a new, custom presentation, or left as independent units. As all of the presentations use the same look and feel, slides can easily be copied from one to another. The new system is delivering nearly four times the volume of presentations delivered by the general content management system, and was chosen for an internal Marketing Excellence award by Cisco.

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