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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MindTouch knows a little bit about software documentation. If you are familiar with the company at all you know that over the last several years they have made a huge outreach to the software documentation and technical writing communities. Their MindTouch Technical Communications Suite helps some of the largest organizations in the world collaborate on and deliver technical documentation. Obviously, as a leader in the technical communications industry MindTouch needs to make sure that their documentation is top notch.

What documentation software 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. (more…)

For quite awhile now we have offered online chat from our website. A lot of our customers have asked us about our experience with offering chat support. They ask because they are concerened about adding chat to their website. They are worried about how much time it will take and whether or not they will get inundated with chat requests. In this post I’ll tell you about our experience with online chat as well as how we and some of our customers use ScreenSteps Live to improve the chat experience for our customers and support agents.

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.

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Today we are happy to be able to show you a new look that is coming to ScreenSteps Live support sites. Since we first launched ScreenSteps Live we have learned a lot about how users want to browse documentation as well as how our customers want to customize their ScreenSteps Live sites. For the past several months we have been working to create a simple ScreenSteps Live template that met the following goals:

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.

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This week we have released two now tools that make creating content on ScreenSteps Live even easier.

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 ;).

Category: Keywords: ScreenSteps.me, customer support, marketing, screenshots, ScreenSteps Desktop Status: draft

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.

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For quite awhile now we have had some great integrations between Zendesk and ScreenSteps Live. For those of you who don’t know, Zendesk is a web based help ticketing and customer community platform. ScreenSteps Live is a hosted CMS for visual documentation.

We have heard from some Zendesk users though who just want to use ScreenSteps Desktop to upload content to the built-in Zendesk forums. We are happy to announce that, as of ScreenSteps 2.8.7 (currently in beta), that is now possible.

But not only can you create forum topics using ScreenSteps Pro, you can also respond to forum topics using ScreenSteps Pro.

Check out the video below for an example. We think that you will agree that it sure beats uploading images in a web based WYSIWYG editor.

If you are a Zendesk user then try it for yourself.

Download the ScreenSteps 2.8.7 Beta

• ScreenSteps Pro + Zendesk Documentation

When creating software documentation what could be better than using ScreenSteps? Why, using ScreenSteps with a group of your favorite co-workers, of course! Now you can do just that because today we released ScreenSteps Workgroup, the fastest way for teams to create visual documentation.

ScreenSteps Workgroup works very much the same as ScreenSteps always has. The main differences are:

• Your data is now stored on a central server in your internal network.
• Team members can check out lessons to let others know that they are working on them. ScreenSteps Workgroup’s simple locking functionality keeps team members from accidentally editing the same lesson at the same time.

Now you don’t have to worry about passing lesson and manual packages back and forth or accidentally overwriting someone else’s changes. All of your authors can work together in a simple, straightforward environment.

To learn more about ScreenSteps Workgroup please visit the web page. If you would like to request a demo key so you can try ScreenSteps Workgroup out at your organization let us know.

Learn more about ScreenSteps Workgroup