One of our customers is in the process of rolling out our Excel Add-in, and wanted to find the easiest and most effective means for training the end-users on how to use it. For those who are not familiar with our product selling model, we record demos of each of our products and post them on the website, so that prospective customers can get comfortable with how it works prior to making the commitment to contact us for a potential trial of the product.

This customer asked us to remove the product configuration topic from the demo (as end-users don't do configuration), and provide them a version they could use internally to accomplish this. This way, the end-users can quickly navigate between the different topics and see how they would use it (the fact that this demo shows GL and the initial rollout is for GL users was a benefit as well).

I decided to use this opportunity to finally upgrade the version of Camtasia I used, because it has the option of including the table of contents directly in the flash file, instead of generating HTML with it (which makes it much easier for packaging, embedding, and sharing).

Here is what I came up with:

Doing it this way has a lot of benefits

• You can put the training on your corporate intranet, so that it's easy to get to
• You can show navigation and what they should expect instead of describing it
• The file size isn't that much larger than the documentation (with all the screenshots we put in, our doc is around 3-4MB in size, whereas this flash is about 8MB in size which really suprised me)
• Users are much more likely to watch a 10 minute flash demo than to read through a manual or go to a training class.

Labels: Reporting, User