We rarely share what’s going on behind the scenes at Rubis. Typically we’re a preoccupied with deploying Google Apps, supporting our customers and keeping up with the onslaught of new features/functions/tools gushing out of the Google Apps team. So today, we thought we should you in on one of the challenges we’ve been having and how Twitter helped to solve it. Ok, not really, Twitter just enabled us to be lazy…umm more productive.
Getting up to speed with Google Apps is pretty easy for most people and companies. Nonetheless, our customers typically need some form of training and support. Typically, we handle questions via our “support portal” which consists of Zendesk, FAQ’s on a Getting Started with Google Apps website and telephone. More often than not, the answers are floating between our ears or on the web somewhere but tracking down “how to delete a Site” can sometimes take longer to find than their busy schedules allow.
Over the past year we’ve built some training guides but have relied heavily on webinars and onsite/in person training. Things in the cloud move so quickly that it has been difficult to invest a lot of training/support materials. Nonetheless, one of our goals this quarter was to find an agile solution for Google Apps training and knowledge sharing.
I’m uncertain when I started following Adria Richards on Twitter but I did and here we are. Subconsciously it may have had something to do with her affinity for geek goodness or maybe it was that she’s a fellow midwesterner. Fortunately, I happened to catch a tweet from Adria about ScreenSteps, an application that can be used to take screen captures and create step-by-step instructions. I’ve used similar tools in the past but typically they’re overly complex feature set isn’t exactly “agile”. ScreenSteps on the other hand…broke the mold.
The name says it all, ScreenSteps is an application that helps create step-by-step guides on how to do cool stuff with Google Apps…amongst other things. What’s especially mind blowing is that ScreenSteps has the capability to publish directly to a Google Site within your Google Apps account. Extendability was by far one of the biggest hurdles we were trying to overcome when creating our Google Apps training guides. Essentially, we wanted a “build once, run anywhere” approach in order to decrease the time it takes to distribute our training and support content. The other big ticket feature was that the output had to be easy to update…especially important after hearing there are 200 enhancements scheduled for Google Apps this year.
Read more about Adria Richards: On her blog But Youre a Girl
Read more about ScreenSteps by Blue Mango: Blue Mango Blog
Read more about Zendesk: Zendesk Blog
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