Major Updates Coming to ScreenSteps Live this Week

After many months of work, we are extremely excited to announce a major update to the ScreenSteps Live service. You are receiving this email because you have either created an account on ScreenSteps Live or have subscribed to our mailing list.

If you fall into either of the two groups below, the updates to ScreenSteps Live are going to make your life much easier: You need an efficient way of sharing your ScreenSteps Live source content amongst a team of authors. You need a streamlined, “no IT guy required”, method of publishing, distributing and controlling access to your lessons. What is so exciting about this update?

Faster Than Ever

Instantly publish entire manuals to ScreenSteps Live.

Easier to Work as a Team

Automatically download revisions from ScreenSteps Live into ScreenSteps Desktop and then publish those changes for other team members. ScreenSteps Live can become the central hub for your documentation source material.

Simpler Distribution/Permissions

Distribution and permissions have been greatly simplified making it even easier to deliver the right content to the right audience.

Read below for more detailed information.

What is New on ScreenSteps Live?

In short, just about everything, but here is a more detailed list:

• Publish complete manuals to ScreenSteps Live with one click from ScreenSteps Desktop.
• Download lesson packages and complete manuals from ScreenSteps Live right from within the ScreenSteps Desktop software.
• Sync manual contents between your desktop and ScreenSteps Live, making it much easier to work on manuals as a team.
• Simplified permissions. With this update we are introducing a new “Spaces” feature. You control who has access to a space on your account. You can then drop your lessons or manuals into that space. You no longer have to control viewing permissions on a per lesson basis.
• Improved commenting system.
• Easier editing of online manuals with support for Internet Explorer 6/7, Firefox and Safari.
• Simplified custom templates.
• Unlimited Reader accounts for all plans.

What is Going to Change?

Your customers will no longer be able to view your Manuals, Lessons and Tags tabs. This area will only be for Admin and Author users you create on your account.

Your customers will only be able to view lessons and manuals that are assigned to a space. As we migrate your account a couple of things will happen automatically:

• If you have public lessons or manuals they will be placed in a new, publicly accessible space.
• If you have private lessons or manuals they will be placed in a protected space. Any readers you have assigned to those manuals will be given access to that space.

Of course you will be able to configure this however you want, but this initial setup will help make the transition as smooth as possible. Any existing urls will automatically be redirected to their new location after the update.

What is Going Away?

If you have been using your ScreenSteps Live account to host images for lessons that you were inserting into other web services, you will no longer be able to do so once the update is released.

IMPORTANT: You can still post to your own blog or wiki using the ScreenSteps Desktop software as long is you use one of the supported services (MovableType, Wordpress, TypePad, MindTouch Deki and Confluence). We have added these native export features into the desktop software so that you would not need a ScreenSteps Live account to publish to your blog or wiki.

Changes to ScreenSteps Desktop

In conjunction with the update to ScreenSteps Live we will be releasing a public beta of ScreenSteps 2.5. This will be a free update to all ScreenSteps 2 users. A lot of work has gone into this update, especially in regards to the integration between ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live. We have also added some other great features such as:

• A new text annotation tool.
• Easier reordering of steps.
• Status indicators to help you track whether a lesson is ready for publishing.
• Redesigned interface and nomenclature to make the relationship between manuals, chapters and lessons (formerly manuals, sections and lessons) more clear.
• Improved ability to handle large ScreenSteps lessons.
• Many speed improvements to the interface.

The public beta of 2.5 will be available on Friday, December 5th.

When Will All This Happen?

We are planning on rolling out the changes on Thursday evening Dec. 4th between 11pm and 12am EST. ScreenSteps Live will be unavailable while we perform the update. Please check our blog for updated information.

If you want to look at lessons that cover the new features available on ScreenSteps Live, you can view the temporary manual here. Please feel free to contact us at support at screensteps dot com with any questions or concerns.

Tags: ScreenSteps Desktop, ScreenSteps Live

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under ScreenSteps Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.