Happy belated Valentines Day! We got you a gift because we care.
That gift is a brand shiny new sharing interface that allows you to customise sharing right at the slide level. Super!
Here's how it works.
First if you're completely new to Showcase - when we talk about "sharing" we mean files you've specified that your users can send out of Showcase to potential customers and prospects. Showcase's magical analytics engine tracks those shares and whether your recipients actually opened their emails and looked at your files or not. Ace. You can find out more about Sharing from the "Shared Content" section of our Knowledge Base.
So previously, when you went to "Manage Sharing" for a particular showcase, it would take you to this independent "Manage Sharing" screen. That old screen looked a bit like this:
From today however, when you click on 'Manage Sharing' from the Home tab, it's going to pop a dialog like this:
That tickbox in the middle, "Allow full showcase to be shared", corresponds exactly to the old "Allow full showcase to be shared" ON | OFF toggle that we used to have.
Nothing has really changed here; this will function the same way. If you used to have "Allow full showcase to be shared" switched ON, then this box will be ticked for you; if you had the toggle switched OFF then the tickbox will not be ticked and your users will not be able to share the full showcase. (For more info on what it means to "share the full showcase", check out our Knowledge Base article here).
The second section in the dialog refers to files that are "Shareable on all slides". This section corresponds to the files you used to "Add" to the section in the middle of the old Manage Sharing screen. Again, if you used to have files added here, these will now have carried over into the "Shareable on all slides" section.
As before, these files are ordered alphabetically and will appear in the Sharing dialog in the app no matter what slide the viewer is on. Just like before, you can remove files from this list (you now do so using the 'x' at the end of the row) and you can also add new files to this list using the "Add file" button.
So far, none of the actual functionality is any different; it's just the layout which has changed.
However, if we go to that same "Manage Sharing" dialog while editing a showcase, we see something pretty cool.
Here I am editing the Acme Anvils Showcase on slide D1.
And if I click "Manage Sharing" from here I can see a new section in the Manage Sharing dialog: "Shareable on this slide (D1)".
What this means is that I can add files to D1 that are only shareable when viewers are on D1, looking at this slide.
Given that it's a pricing slide, I may want to be able to share specific pricing information only from this slide. Or it might be that if my reps are showing a prospect this slide, they are ready to purchase, so I can add a sales agreement to this slide. Let's see how that looks. I'll use "Add file", and pick my Sales Agreement from the file library.
Excellent. So now, if I publish that showcase, and my viewers are on slide D1, this is what they'll see in the sharing dialog:
However if viewing the showcase from a slide that doesn't have slide specific sharing, for example, A1, the dialog simply shows the files that are available on all slides:
In addition to making files shareable from certain slides on this "Manage Sharing" dialog, it's also possible to make a file shareable at the point that you add it to a hotspot. So for example if I am adding a video to a hotspot, I can choose to make that video shareable from this specific slide as well, by ticking "Shareable on this slide":
If I go ahead and tick that on, the file will automatically appear in the Manage Sharing dialog as well:
Just like with all sharing changes previously, adding or removing files to be shared from certain slides counts as a "change" that has to be published in order for it to show up on Viewer users' devices.
It's important to note:
This 'slide-specific' sharing setup will replace "In-place sharing" on all Showcase apps version 7 and above.
If you had in-place sharing turned on previously, the 'active files' that were previously shareable via in-place will have been made shareable from their respective slides on app versions 7 and above.
For app versions lower than this, the "in-place" functionality remains available, and you can control it via this link in the "Manage Sharing" dialog:
Hopefully this is all making sense! We encourage you to take a look at this new feature and give it a spin for yourself.
For any questions, hit up the friendly team at helpdesk@showcaseworkshop.com. Happy showcasing!