Last night we pushed some changes to ScreenSteps Live to make it easier to respond to user comments on your lessons. We have also made it much easier to manage Reader permissions on ScreenSteps Live.

Respond to Comments

A lot of the comments we get on lessons are actually questions about our product. We found a couple of things:

1. Sometimes we wanted to just respond to a comment with an email to the person. We have now made that much easier to do.
2. Oftentimes the answer to the user’s question was in a lesson somewhere else in the same manual. We have now made it really easy to insert a link to another lesson in the same manual into your response.

You can check out this lesson to see how it all works:

• Responding to Comments

Readers and Groups

We have greatly simplified the process of managing permissions for readers. You can now see all of reader’s activity, what manuals they have access to and what groups they belong to from one screen. We also improved the Groups list. Check out the following lessons to see the changes. We hope you find the updates useful.

• Setting Reader Permissions and Viewing Reader Activity
• The Groups List

Over the weekend we posted some updates to ScreenSteps Live. This is the start to a slightly different direction for ScreenSteps Live so we wanted to let you know what we have been doing and where we are going.

When ScreenSteps Live was originally launched it was really just a place to post ScreenSteps lessons. It was somewhat like a blog for ScreenSteps lessons.

The problem we found for our customers, and for ourselves, was that we didn’t want to have yet “another” blog for tutorials. So we really didn’t end up using ScreenSteps Live that way. ScreenSteps Live for us, and for many of our customers, became a place to support users by creating online manuals. But not a place to just occasionally post lessons.

We could see this in our customer usage. Our customers that were using ScreenSteps Live as a customer support tool were posting a lot of lessons and posting very regularly. Those who were just using it as a kind of blog only posted occasionally.

With this realization we have made a few changes to ScreenSteps Live. I don’t want to say that we are relaunching ScreenSteps Live but we are definitely heading in a slightly different direction.

Quick List of Changes

Here is a quick list of the changes launched this weekend:

1. No more front page lessons - There are no longer lessons available at the main screenstepslive.com site. If users want to see your lessons then they must specifically go to your account. For example, ours is bmls.screenstepslive.com.
2. Embed full manuals into your website - You can now embed the table of contents for a complete manual into your own website or web app. Just copy some javascript code and insert it into your web page. The table of contents will appear on your own web page and will update each time you change your manual on ScreenSteps Live. This gives you the benefit of the ease of use of ScreenSteps Live while still having the manual table of contents appear on your site. Once the user clicks on a link in your manual they will be taken to the lesson on ScreenSteps Live. Here is a lesson on how to do it: Embedding Manuals.
3. Updated Plans - The available plans have changed slightly. The main change has come to the free plan. Before the free plan was just a place to post ScreenSteps Live lessons. If that is all you want to do then we really suggest that you use ScreenSteps 2.1 with a blog service such as WordPress or TypePad. The new free plan is really a chance for you to try out the features available on ScreenSteps Live for customer support.

If you already have a free plan nothing will change for you. You still have the same plan that you had before. The updated free plans only affect new users of ScreenSteps Live.

A More Detailed Look At The Changes and Where ScreenSteps Live is Going

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Update 5/07/2008: Added screencast showing blog uploading.

Download URLS for 2.1 Beta:

Download Beta 2.1 for Windows

Download Beta 2.1 for Mac

We just wanted to announce that ScreenSteps 2.1 public beta is available. A couple of big changes in this one.

Post to WordPress, TypePad or Movable Type

First, the most exciting news. You can now publish directly to your own WordPress, TypePad or Movable Type blog using ScreenSteps. You no longer need to have a ScreenSteps Live account to publish to your blog. We think that this is very cool and so have our initial testers, so download the beta and try it out for yourself.

Here is a video showing off the feature:

Topics are now Manuals

The naming of Topics in the UI has been changed to Manuals. This is essentially what Topics are and we think that it will make the whole concept of how to use ScreenSteps much clearer. Why didn’t we call them Manuals from the start? At the time we had good reasons. They don’t seem as good now.

Download the Public Beta

There are a lot of other fixes in the release notes in case you are interested.

Download the public beta and let us know what you think:

Download Beta 2.1 for Windows

Download Beta 2.1 for Mac

You can see a lesson about how to configure the blog settings here.

We wanted to notify all of our users of a few changes that are coming to ScreenSteps Live. These changes will primarily affect paid account holders.

This weekend we will be changing the name of “Topics” to “Manuals”. Some of our users were confused about what Topics really were and how they should organize their content. We think that a simple rename will make this much clearer. Don’t worry if you have sent urls out that look like http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/1. Those will redirect tohttp://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/1 after the update so none of your links will be broken.

In addition, we are changing the look a little bit for the new “Manuals”. You can now add a message to the left of each manual where you can include links to your mains site or other relevant information. We plan to add some additional options to this “Manuals Sidebar” in the near future, so stay tuned.

We have also added two new options, “Require Login for All Users” and “Permalinks for Manuals”.

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