UpSlide is an Add-in to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, and it helps finance professionals build on-brand documents faster. This page introduces all IT aspects of UpSlide deployment and points towards all the necessary resources should you need more information.
Deployment and installation
UpSlide is an add-in to the Microsoft Office applications: Excel, PowerPoint and Word. It needs the prerequisites below:
- VSTO, Visual Studio Tools for Office, which you can install from Microsoft's website
- .Net Framework v4.8
- Microsoft Edge for the PowerBI link feature
- Microsoft Vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11 (x32 or x64)
- Microsoft Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, Office 365
UpSlide can be deployed like any windows software, using a .exe or .msi file. All information regarding the deployment is available in the below articles:
Architecture
UpSlide does not store any data outside your network apart from the personal user data necessary for licensing and usage statistics.
UpSlide gives direct access to a library of centrally managed assets (slides, images, charts, workbooks) stored within your network or your SharePoint tenant. There is also a local copy of these assets on each machine for offline work.
You can find a diagram of our architecture in this article.
Communication with UpSlide server
UpSlide needs to communicate with our servers to:
- Activate the software (upon first starting MS Office).
- Retrieve the software settings (most notably the location of the UpSlide content library within your network).
- Download software updates.
- Gather usage statistics summarised in a dashboard to give you a clear picture of the ROI of your investment in UpSlide.
This page describes in detail the nature of the exchange with our servers. In short, UpSlide sends the user's email to our server, and the user receives either a license code, a settings file or an update package.
Personal data hosting
UpSlide collects personal user data such as Email and Name for Licensing purposes. We store this data on Microsoft Cloud Azure (West-Europe) Servers.
This page describes in detail the security of our servers.
Setting up libraries
The UpSlide content library offers easy access to up-to-date content (corporate slides, logos, bios, etc.) and graphical elements (layouts, tables, icons, etc.) directly within PowerPoint, Excel and Word.
This page describes in detail how our library works.
In short, you will need to set up either a SharePoint site or network storage. UpSlide will use this location to store content and settings. Some users will push new content via the UpSlide interface, and, thanks to our built-in synchronisation system, all other users will get a local copy.
Provisioning
You will need to register on our server the users authorised to get an UpSlide license. You can do this provisioning in one of 3 ways below:
- Manually via our Portal website (you can use a .csv file to bulk import).
- Automatically via Azure AD provisioning. If you have an Azure AD Tenant, you can easily set it up to grant an UpSlide license to any users part of a given AD group.
- Should you decide to deploy UpSlide to all of your employees, we can set up a system where no provisioning is needed.
Support
Our Support Team can be contacted by email directly from the UpSlide application. Our core Support team average response time is below 2 hours between 8 am and 5 pm GMT. Your dedicated account team is also available for blocking issues in other time zones (east-coast USA, Central European, Singapore).
We can also configure UpSlide to forward all support requests to your Support team. We provide a guide for Level-1 UpSlide support to assist them, and they can escalate complex issues to our team.
