A template is a file that carries a master, its layouts, a theme, and no content worth speaking of. Opening one gives you a new deck already inheriting all of it.
People use the words "theme" and "template" loosely, but the difference decides what you can hand a colleague. A theme carries colours, fonts and effects, and it can be applied to an existing deck. A template carries a theme plus the master, the layouts, the placeholder geometry, and usually a small number of example slides. Applying a theme repaints a deck. Starting from a template gives you the whole structure.
What makes a template worth keeping?
Four properties separate a template worth keeping from one that gets abandoned in a shared drive.
It covers the roles people actually build. If half the decks made from it need a layout it doesn't have, people will improvise, and improvisation is where local overrides come from. Watch what your team builds for a month before you decide what goes in the layout set.
It ships with example slides that are correct. Two or three filled slides, built properly on the layouts, showing what a title looks like at its real length and what a chart looks like in its placeholder. People copy examples. Give them a right one to copy and most of the enforcement problem disappears.
It ships with a style note of one page. What the two colours mean, when the accent is used, the type scale, the outer margin, the exceptions that were deliberate, and one sentence on what to do when the layout set does not fit. One page, because nobody reads a longer document, and an unread rule might as well not exist.
It has a version and a date in the file name. The section on version control is about why.
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Do existing decks update when the template changes?
People expect a fifth property that isn't there, and it causes more confusion in teams than all the others. A template works like a stamp. A deck created from it holds its own copy of the master and the theme from the moment it's created. Change the template afterwards and nothing changes in decks already built from it. That surprises anyone used to linked styles in other kinds of software, and the section on version control is about nothing else.