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.

You can also set a preference for how you would like to have chapters expanded when the page opens: no expansion, just expand the current chapter or expand all chapters.

Procedural Manuals

Some manuals are just a collection of articles. But some are designed to be followed in a step by step fashion from lesson to lesson. We call these tyes of manuals procedural manuals. You can now choose to mark manuals as procedural. Procedural manuals will have numbers prepended to the chapter and lesson name.

The impetus for this feature came from our ideas about roadmaps and roadblocks (read more about roadmaps and roadblocks). For a long time, ScreenSteps Live has been really good at removing roadblocks for users. We are now working on making it easier to provide roadmaps for your users. So, if you are creating a new user set up guide or an implementation guide we would suggest that you try out procedural manuals.

• Learn how to adjust chapter and procedural settings for your manuals

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.

See the video below for an overview of how it works:

This is currently a beta feature so if you would like to start using it on your account you need to do two things:

1. Download the latest ScreenSteps Desktop beta.
2. Submit a support request asking us to activate this feature on your account.

Try it out, we think you are going to really like this for quickly editing lessons on ScreenSteps Live.

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.

OneLogin has a special plan for organizations that want to use the Active Directory integration with a single application like ScreenSteps Live. It costs just $1/month per user. You can sign up for a OneLogin trial account here. See these instructions to learn how to configure ScreenSteps Live to work with OneLogin.

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

Enjoy.

Learn more about Salesforce and ScreenSteps Live

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.

Free eBook: 5 Keys to Successful Documentation

Learn how to get better results out of your software documentation:

Download our free eBook »

• 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.

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.

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:

1. Improve customer support by integrating ScreenSteps Live with their help ticketing system.
2. Reduce adoption costs for their new customers (very important with the current shrinkage in state budgets).
3. Drive customer success by expanding their use of ScreenSteps Live beyond just showing customers how to use their product into showing educators how to interpret and act on data to create meaningful outcomes in students’ lives.

We love this quote from Jenny Rankin, Chief Education and Research Officer for Illuminate Education:

“I honestly believe that our help system (ScreenSteps Live) is a big piece of how we ultimately help kids. The fact that documentation, something that is so often thought of as a peripheral feature, is able to take a center-stage role as one of the ways we are impacting kids is really amazing.”

Read the case study to learn more about how Illuminate Education is making an impact with ScreenSteps Live.

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.

Native Max OS X Key Bindings

Option-arrow now moves the cursor one word at a time and Command-arrow moves to the end of the line on Mac. All of the other standard Mac key bindings are included as well.

Code Block Formatting

If you need to insert some form of code into your lessons (for example if you are explaining how to use some PHP or JavaScript code) you can now apply code formatting to the text.

PDF Improvements

PDF templates can now use a wide variety of fonts and support all of the languages that are supported in the ScreenSteps editor. In addition you can now add borders to your images in PDF templates.

Web Export/ScreenSteps Live Improvements

We have also done a lot of work on web exporting including improvements to Google Docs and Zendesk output. We have also improved the integration with ScreenSteps Live, allowing you to import multiple lessons at a time from ScreenSteps Live.

Auto Updates

You can now have ScreenSteps automatically check for updates.

We hope you like the update. For those who would like all of the details you can read the full release note here or you can just download ScreenSteps 2.9 right now!

Free eBook: 5 Keys to Successful Documentation

Learn how to get better results out of your software documentation:

Download our free eBook »

What tool does MindTouch use to author their documentation? ScreenSteps Workgroup. We just published and interview with Kelly Abbott, MindTouch’s VP of Product Development.

Kelly explains how they are using ScreenSteps at MindTouch:

“We’re in the process of redoing many of our user guides to make them much more visual and we are using ScreenSteps for all of it. ScreenSteps really speeds up the writing process and improves the clarity of what we are writing.”

In the interview Kelly also details:

• How MindTouch incorporates ScreenSteps into their workflow
• How ScreenSteps improves their customer communications
• How ScreenSteps has changed the way MindTouch writes software documentation.

You can read the full interview here.

Free eBook: 5 Keys to Successful Documentation

Learn how to get better results out of your software documentation:

Download our free eBook »

Is online chat worth it?

Yes! We added chat to our site over a year ago and it has definitely been worth it. I would say that over half of the chat requests we receive are actually pre-sales questions. Often someone just has a question about a feature, an integration or product licensing. By being able to answer their question instantly we have been able to close many sales that would have otherwise been delayed or abandoned. I have spoken with several other users of chat services and they report similar experiences. So, from a strictly monetary standpoint, chat makes a lot of sense.

It is also great as a customer support tool, but this is where you need to be careful. If you don’t have the proper systems and resources in place then online chat can end up taking a lot of time as you try to explain solutions to your customers’ problems. This is where ScreenSteps Live makes a big difference for us. We leverage our ScreenSteps Live documentation site to reduce the time we spend answering support chats.

Using ScreenSteps Live with Online Chat – Basekit

Basekit, one of our customers, has had a lot of success integrating ScreenSteps Live into their online chats. They use their ScreenSteps Live documentation to handle two types of questions, “Does it do this?” (pre-sales questions) and “How do I do this?” (support questions). In the video below Gordon Plant from Basekit explains how ScreenSteps Live is helping them scale their online chat support.

Read our full case study on how Basekit uses ScreenSteps Live

Basekit will even create new documentation in their ScreenSteps Live site during a support chat and send the answer to the user.

How to Leverage ScreenSteps Live in Online Support Chats

Most of the articles in our ScreenSteps Live documentation site answer specific questions such as “How do I configure my desktop software?” or “How do I create a custom template?” When a user asks one of these questions we use the ScreenSteps Live Support Client to find the article that answers their question. The ScreenSteps Live Support Client lets us quickly copy a url that points to the article with the answer the customer needs. Instead of spending a lot of time typing out an answer that is either lengthy and confusing or short and incomplete, we just paste in a url. The user clicks on it and is instantly taken to an article full of detailed pictures that helps them accomplish whatever task they are struggling with.

This works even better with more involved chats. Sometimes we have customers that are trying to accomplish a more complex task. We can point them to the articles they need for each step of the process. Many times I will send multiple articles in a chat and the customer will reference them after the chat session has ended. Once again this saves us and our customers a lot of time and spares us a lot of the confusion that is inherent in text only communications.

The best part is that our customers love it. They will often read a help article that we have sent them, come back to the chat and thank us for providing such clear instructions. Like Gordon said in the video above, it is a great outcome for both of us. The customer is happy and we don’t spend all day typing.

1. It had to be beautiful
2. It had to make it easy for end-users to “discover” information
3. It had to be more customizable than what we had previously offered
4. It had to be easy to set up and maintain

After a lot of long nights we are very happy with the results. We think you will be too.

The New Look

We know that our users want to create beautiful documentation with a minimum of fuss. The new ScreenSteps Live template has a very pleasant styling that helps you look great right from the start.

Better Navigation

With this new release we really wanted to focus on discoverability. It has always been really easy to search your documentation on ScreenSteps Live. We wanted to make it easier to browse. We have added a new chapters sidebar widget that displays all of the chapters for the current manual making it easy for your users to browse your ScreenSteps Live site.

Better Lesson Presentation

We have also improved the presentation of lessons:

1. The search box is now more prominent
2. Manual navigation appears right at the top of the content area
3. The formatting of lesson content has been improved

We have also added a new lightbox effect for viewing oversized images. Here is the zoom icon:

And the zoomed image:

Better Customization

With this new release we have added a lot more customization options. You can now do the following:

1. Add custom javascript (ideal for adding Google Analytics or any other tracking code to your site)
2. Customize all text strings (this will be especially useful for our international users)
3. Control what items appear in your sidebar.
4. Have more consistent HTML markup for adding custom CSS

Adding custom javascript

Customizing text strings

Customizing sidebars

You now have complete control over what items appear in your sidebar. You can even choose whether you would like your sidebar to appear on the left or on the right.

Improved Markup

We have also gone back and totally redesigned the HTML markup giving you many more id’s and classes to allow you to customize all of the elements on the page with custom CSS.

How to get it

The new templating system is currently in beta. It you would like to try it out just follow the instructions here:

Activating the new template on your space

See an Example and Give Us Feedback

You can see an example of the new ScreenSteps Live template here:

ScreenSteps Live New Template Example

We would love to hear your feedback on the new look and functionality. We really think this new template will help you create beautiful documentation with less work.

Auto Comparing Manuals

ScreenSteps Live is being used among larger and larger teams. Our users told us that they were often unsure if the manual they had in their desktop software matched the latest content that had been posted to ScreenSteps Live.

You have always been able to perform a check to see everything was up to date but that was a step that was easy to forget. Our users told us that they wanted ScreenSteps to automatically check for them, letting them know if there were any changes they needed to download.

We are happy to announce that, as of version 2.8.7, ScreenSteps will automatically compare your manuals for you. Watch the video below for an overview of how it works.

Managing Redirects

The beauty of ScreenSteps Live is that it lets you evolve your documentation over time. But as your documentation grows you may find that you need to reorganize things. You may want to split lessons out into a new manual or bucket, or consolidate two manuals down to one. But what do you do with those inbound urls that are pointing to lessons, chapters, buckets and manuals that aren’t in your ScreenSteps Live site anymore?

With the new Redirects feature you can now redirect outdated urls to your current content. Watch the video below for an overview of how it works.

Finally, if you are using ScreenSteps Live to support your customers you should really check out our new ScreenSteps.me service. It is a great addition to the customer support process.

That is all for now. We hope you find these new features useful and that they help you spend even less time creating your documentation ;).

We just launched our public beta of ScreenSteps.me last week and the response has been pretty exciting. I have to say that I haven’t been this excited about a new feature in ScreenSteps since we released our integration with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps Desktop. ScreenSteps Live solved a huge problem for me as a business owner. It let me support more customers with less time and effort. During the two weeks I have been using ScreenSteps.me, it has saved me hours time. Here are just a few of the ways I have been using ScreenSteps.me.

1. Communicating with virtual workers

We recently started working with a freelancer on Elance. She is doing some CSS work for some new templates we have coming to ScreenSteps Live. Elance has a message board where I can give job descriptions and provide feedback on the work provided. I have been using ScreenSteps.me to do two things:

• Describe the work I want done
• Provide feedback on the the work that has been submitted

The whole process has gone very smoothly. I have never had to send follow up messages to clarify what I need. Almost all of the “back and forth” that is usually involved in trying to describe how I want a job done has been eliminated. I ask for something and a day or two later I get a message that it is completed. It is wonderful.

View an example of one of our Elance posts

2. Bug reports

I use a lot of software products everyday in my business. Invariably I find bugs in the products I use (including the ones we develop). But describing bugs in an online chat or email can be tedious and usually involves a lot of back and forth communication as the company tries to understand the problem I am having.

With ScreenSteps.me I just document the bug and send the company a link to the ScreenSteps.me page. In the past two weeks I have used this to post in forums, send in support emails and describe problems in online support chats. It takes me less time to describe the bug (less typing) and I don’t get follow-up emails with additional questions.

3. Email marketing/web page marketing

With our recent launch of ScreenSteps 2.8.7 we wanted to provide a brief overview of the new features. We wanted to push this announcement into three areas:

1. Email announcement via MailChimp
2. A “What’s New” page on our site
3. A “What’s New” page in our documentation

I used ScreenSteps.me HTML templates to prepare my MailChimp campaign in just a few minutes. I copied the same HTML to use in our “What’s New” page on our site, and then published the lesson to ScreenSteps Live as part of our manual. In just a few minutes I had published my content to three locations, a process that would have previously taken me at least an hour.

4. Personalized customer support

Several times over the past two weeks I have been corresponding with customers that had an issue that could easily be solved by showing them a couple of screenshots. One customer was having trouble upgrading their account on ScreenSteps Live and another wanted to do some unique formatting with in a lesson. In both cases I just sent them a link to a lesson I posted on ScreenSteps.me and the issue was resolved immediately.

One of these lessons I may polish up and include in our manual. The other was really just for that one customer. ScreenSteps.me gave me a fast and simple way of communicating clearly in these unique situations.

View an example of customer support post

5. Communicating on projects

As we were going through the final testing and design of the latest ScreenSteps Desktop release there were many times when I needed to provide feedback to Trevor. ScreenSteps.me made this so much easier. We aren’t in the same office so we mostly communicate via IM during the day. We also use Pivotal Tracker to manage all of our development. There isn’t a real easy way to add images to Pivotal Tracker stories so we just inserted links to pages on ScreenSteps.me.

6. Writing blog posts

I didn’t write this blog post in ScreenSteps. But I did use ScreenSteps to prepare all of the images. I then published to ScreenSteps.me and used the image urls that were returned to me to insert into the blog post. It was a lot faster than uploading images one by one via the WordPress web interface.

How are you going to use ScreenSteps.me?

ScreenSteps.me is one of the most exciting developments we have had with ScreenSteps yet. I am able to communicate more clearly in less time and use ScreenSteps in situations where I never have before. We’re excited to see what our customers will do with ScreenSteps.me as we move forward.