The documents you upload are encrypted in-flight and at rest.

Data transmission between your browser and our site is encrypted and authenticated using TLS 1.2, ECDHE_ECDSA with X25519, and AES_128_GCM.

Our disk storage security is: AES-256 encryption (256-bit keys); XTS for block cipher mode; SHA-256 for key derivation; and PBKDF2 for key stretching.

You control access to your content using the platform’s Share and Access Control functionality.

From a physical disk perspective, your uploaded files sit on a server behind a firewall. The server is not directly accessible from the Internet. The Semlr team that accesses this server to deploy software upgrades, does not have the encryption key to the content and therefore cannot access user content.

Semlr is hosted at UpCloud’s datacenter in London. The data backups are also located in London.

Currently there is no integration between these platforms and Semlr. This is a deliberate decision. We think it is good workflow practice to separate one’s personal and team workspaces from broadcast and communication sites.

Think of file storing and sharing platforms like Office, Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, Box, etc. as places where teams collaborate. There’s co-authoring, version control, multi-device syncs happening. Content is changed often and progress is highly iterative.

Semlr comes into the picture when the deck or file is ready to be released. You simply drag the file from your file system into the the Semlr web application, and you’re live!

No, Semlr does not provide authoring or editing capabilities. You should continue to author and edit your files in tools like Microsoft Powerpoint.

Semlr has been built to assemble and share content. Analogous to how software is built, where code is modular and packaged in libraries that are then reused across multiple programs… think of Semlr enabling a similar way of working but with content.

Instead of creating many versions of similar decks in PowerPoint (often by copying a prior version to use as a starting point for a new deck), think of the different topics or modules that make up a deck. Consider how these modules are reused across multiple decks. Then write a topic/module just once and upload it to Semlr. This becomes a reusable component that can be assembled with other component to create a new final deck in Semlr.

The benefit is that when a module is updated and re-uploaded, each deck that contains that module is automatically updated. This means your decks are always in-sync and up-to-date. Plus it saves you time as you no longer have to make the same update across multiple decks.

PowerPoint occasionally renders differently based on the hardware and operating system that it’s running on. This results in slight differences in how icons or image borders appear. And if a non-standard font used in the deck is not available in Semlr, it results in a substitute font being selected.

So, if you upload a PowerPoint deck to Semlr and notice that it looks slightly different from your computer… then to fix the issue… in PowerPoint, export your deck to PDF and upload that file to Semlr. With PDF files there are no rendering issues.