As our manuals and our customers’ manuals have grown on ScreenSteps Live we have all wanted to provide better ways for people to navigate all of our great help content. This week we have released two updates that we think will make your readers’ experience even better on ScreenSteps Live.

Expand and collapse chapters in the sidebar

Now, by clicking on chapter titles in the right or left sidebar, readers can expand and collapse chapter contents while still viewing a lesson. This makes it much easier to find related lessons.

You can try it out for yourself in our example Salesforce manual.

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Parature Integration

We are excited to announce an integration with our new partner Parature. Parature is a global leader in web-based customer service software. Now you can use ScreenSteps to quickly create knowledge base articles in Parature.

This means that Parature customers can now create knowledge base articles that do more showing then telling. And with ScreenSteps ability to quickly update articles you’ve created you can make sure those articles stay up-to-date.

You can learn how to configure a Parature web export account in ScreenSteps in our manual.

Instantly Edit Lessons and Manuals From ScreenSteps Live

This update also makes ScreenSteps Live customers more efficient. ScreenSteps Live now provides links that will open the lesson or manual that you are viewing right in ScreenSteps Desktop for editing. This makes it a snap to make a quick change without having to go searching for the content in ScreenSteps Desktop.

Workgroup Templates

Many companies now know that ScreenSteps Workgroup is a great solution for collaborating on ScreenSteps content. One problem that many of our customers face, however, is the ability to share a common PDF, Word or HTML template across the organization. In version 2.9.1 you can now add templates to the Workgroup Resource folder and they will be available in any ScreenSteps Desktop clients that are connected.

To learn how to make templates available to all desktop clients please refer to our manual.

ScreenSteps.me is Now Clarify-it.com

If you haven’t already heard, we have been hard at work on a new product named Clarify. Clarify is based on the same concepts as ScreenSteps but is focused on your daily communications. It aims to make those communications faster to create and easier to understand.

With the introduction of Clarify we are renaming the ScreenSteps.me web service to Clarify-it.com. The service remains free for entry level accounts so ScreenSteps customers can continue to post lessons without any changes aside from the branding.

For more information on Clarify please visit the Clarify website. If you would like to read about the differences between Clarify and ScreenSteps we have prepared an article in the manual.

ScreenSteps 2.9.1 is a free update for version 2 license holders.

Visit the ScreenSteps downloads page to get the update. If you would like to purchase ScreenSteps please visit our online store.

We are happy to announce a brand new beta feature on ScreenSteps Live – auto-importing lessons and manuals directly from ScreenSteps Live to ScreenSteps Desktop for editing. Now, instead of having to sync a manual before you edit it, you can simply click a button in the ScreenSteps Live website and have the lesson imported into your ScreenSteps Desktop for editing.

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Last week we released an update to ScreenSteps Live that included SAML authentication. This opens up many more single sign-on options for our ScreenSteps Live customers. OneLogin, one of our partners, offers identity and access management for enterprise web applications. If you are looking for a single sign-on solution for multiple web applications they are a great option.

Active Directory integration with ScreenSteps Live is one of the really nice features OneLogin offers. They have several options for connecting your Active Directory to their identity management system including the following:

• Active Directory connector
• LDAP authentication
• NT LAN Manager (NTLM)

With our SAML integration you can then easily connect ScreenSteps Live to OneLogin. The result? All of your Active Directory users can login to ScreenSteps Live without you having to set up separate accounts or them having to remember a different username and password.

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We are happy to announce that ScreenSteps Live now offers SAML single sign-on support for Salesforce. What does that mean? Single sign-on with ScreenSteps Live and Salesforce just got a lot easier.

Why do you want single sign-on? With single sign-on between ScreenSteps Live and Salesforce your Salesforce users don’t need to remember a separate username and password to access your ScreenSteps Live help content. If they can login to Salesforce then they will have access to your ScreenSteps Live training materials. It makes setting up ScreenSteps Live to work with Salesforce that much simpler.

Of course, we have great instructions to get you up and going right away. Just follow the link below to see how easy it is:

Using SAML Single Sign-on with ScreenSteps Live and Salesforce

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We are happy to announce the public beta of ScreenSteps 2.9.1. ScreenSteps can now publish to Parature knowledge bases. Parature offers web-based customer service software.

This beta also includes some improvements for working with ScreenSteps Workgroup connection files. You can read the full release notes here:

ScreenSteps 2.9.1 beta release notes

If you would like to download the beta you can download it here:

• ScreenSteps 2.9.1 beta Windows
• ScreenSteps 2.9.1 beta Mac

Let us know what you think of the new integration. (more…)

Zendesk will be hosting a ScreenSteps Live/Zendesk webinar on Wednesday, July 20 from 10 AM – 11 AM PDT. In the webinar you will learn:

• How to optimize your documentation for customer support
• How to create “just in time” documentation
• How to integrate ScreenSteps Live with Zendesk to make your support agents more productive

You can register for the webinar here:

Register for webinar

We hope to see you there.

Next week we will be rolling out a release of ScreenSteps Live that has some important changes regarding buckets and manuals. With this release we will start the process of phasing out buckets on ScreenSteps Live. We are also adding several features that make it easier to work with manuals.

Watch the video below for an explanation of the changes:

If you don’t want to watch the video, you can read below for the highlights:

1. As of this release you will no longer be able to create new buckets. We will provide a tool to allow you to convert your existing manuals into buckets. The conversion will take care of moving your lessons into the new manual, adding that manual to spaces that contain the bucket and setting up redirects so that links to your old buckets will point to your new manuals.
2. Manual editing via the web interface has been much improved. You can now do all of your reordering of lessons across chapters from a single page.
3. Manuals will have a new property that will allow you to set a Public Title, basically allowing you to have a separate internal name for the manual and a public, customer facing name. This is for our ScreenSteps Live users that create many similar manuals for different clients and want a way to differentiate those manuals in the administration area and desktop editor.

ScreenSteps Live will be down for a short maintenance period while we push this update. The maintenance window will be from 12:00 AM to 12:15 AM EDT On Wednesday, June 8th.

As we have said before on this blog, it doesn’t matter what your software does, it matters what your customers do with your software. It is always exciting to see how our customers are using ScreenSteps Live, especially when they not only make a big impact on their business, but on their community as well.

Illuminate Education is one of those customers. They provide data applications to educational customers. Their primary mission is to help those educators make a positive difference in students’ lives.

We just published a case study on how Illuminate Education is using ScreenSteps Live to make their mission a reality. Their ScreenSteps Live site has moved well beyond just being a collection of software documentation articles. Illuminate Education uses ScreenSteps Live to achieve three goals:

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Just a quick note to let you know that ScreenSteps 2.9 is now officially available. This update is free for all 2.x licenses owners. Here are some of the highlights.

Bulleted/Numbered Lists

You can now easily add bulleted and numbered lists to your ScreenSteps lessons. It has been our most requested feature and we are thrilled to be able to finally deliver it to you.

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