The first day at Dreamforce was really fantastic. It started out with some very early morning flights and ended with two very exhausted Blue Mango-ers, but everything in-between was amazing. I have to say, of all of the conferences I have attended I have never seen one that was this well organized.

One of the best parts has been meeting so many of our customers as well as the other vendors that we work with.

A little Dreamforce news, Partick Bowl from First Data Merchant Services Corporation will be showing off ScreenSteps during his session “No Train, No Gain: Developing an Effective Training Strategy”. The session will be held Thursday at 9:45 AM in Moscone West 2006. Apparently he is hitting a hot spot in the Salesforce community because his session is already all booked up. But if you get there early you still might be able to sneak in.

Thanks to our Salesforce users that let Patrick know about ScreenSteps. He contacted us after one our users pinged him on Chatter and told him he needed to talk about ScreenSteps in his session.

The events around Dreamforce have really been fun as well. This morning Trevor and I participated in the Dreamforce 5k. It was a fantastic San Francisco morning and a great way to get ready to stand at our booth for 9 hours today :).

If you are at Dreamforce, please come by and tell us how you are using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. We can even show you some cool ways to use the new ScreenSteps.me service with Chatter. We would also love to do a video interview with you to learn how ScreenSteps has made your life easier.

Looking forward to seeing you.

We are very excited to be exhibiting at Dreamforce next week! This is going to be our first Dreamforce event but our Salesforce customers have really been talking it up to us. From everything we have seen so far it looks like it will be a fantastic event.

How to Find Us

We will have a booth in the Exhibitor Pavilion, or what we like to call “Tiny Town.” Since our booth will be slightly smaller than the Salesforce booth we thought you might like a little help finding it. We are booth #7 in the Exhibitor Pavilion.

Exhibitor Pavilion

The Blue Mango Booth

If you are attending Dreamforce then please come by. We are very excited to meet our existing Salesforce customers and to help some other Salesforce users create beautiful documentation :).

You can get a free Keynote and Expo hall pass to Dreamforce by filling out the form here.

We’ll see you next week!

Learn more about Salesforce and ScreenSteps Live

We have seen some changes recently in how our customers are using ScreenSteps that are very interesting. ScreenSteps for a long time has been used mainly to create software documentation for single applications. But now we are seeing more and more customers using ScreenSteps to support the integrated use of many applications.

This is an interesting development in several ways and shows what challenges small businesses, non-profits and educational institutions are facing.

Applications in general are becoming more modular in nature. Looking at our own business, we use separate applications for:

• Help desk
• Online knowledge base
• Email marketing
• CRM
• Project management

We much prefer this approach because instead of getting one app that does a lot of things “kind of well”, we get several apps that do one thing really well.

But this also presents a challenge – integrating all of these apps into a consistent workflow that works for our business. The vendors of the various applications can’t possibly provide documentation on how we will use these products together. If that documentation is going to exist we need to create it because it only applies to us.

For a long time we have used ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live to help ourselves make better use of the technology we purchase. We create documentation that is primarily for internal use. This benefits our business in a variety of ways:

• We spend less time re-learning workflows
• When someone is not around it makes it easier for other workers to take over their responsibilities.
• It makes it easier to add new people to our team on a temporary or permanent basis.
• It helps us integrate the various products/services we use more efficiently.

When we first launched ScreenSteps we were telling a lot of businesses that they should be following this same method of documenting things internally, but our suggestions seemed to largely fall on deaf ears. The companies we were talking to were interested in creating documentation for their customers, but not their employees.

But over the last few months we have really seen a change. We are talking to many more customers that are primarily using ScreenSteps to support their internal employees. We recently did a case study on Jenna Baze at Aero-Metric, Inc. using ScreenSteps and Google Sites to support her colleagues on Salesforce. Her primary job is to keep the sales team running efficiently. Good documentation helps their business run better.

We also did a case study on Judi Sohn at C3. Judi is using ScreenSteps and Google Sites to help her non-profit use Salesforce, WordPress, and other technologies..

We have also seen an uptick in interest from school districts and universities (one of the early adopters of ScreenSteps Live was Saddleback Valley Unified School District who grasped onto the concept of building visual knowledge bases right away and has had fantastic results.)

All these organizations have faced the challenge of getting the maximum benefit out of the technology products they are using. They want to turn technology features into business results. Documentation is helping them do that. ScreenSteps is helping them create that documentation more quickly and more clearly.

We are seeing this shift on ScreenSteps Live as well. Previously we would only hear from users who wanted to use ScreenSteps Live to support external customers. The thought was that internal employees could somehow get by without the same level of support that customers needed. But in recent weeks I would say at least half or more of our ScreenSteps Live customers are starting to use ScreenSteps Live for internal help files as well as external facing material. We are also seeing an increase in users who are only using ScreenSteps Live for internal facing help files.

It is an exciting time to be a small business. There are so many tools available that help you accomplish quite a bit with limited resources. The trick is tying it all together. Creating clear and simple documentation that is specific to your business or organization, regardless of the documentation tool you use, can really help you get the most out of your technology investment.