You Must Be Lost

In my day job, I am a deployment project manager deploying Microsoft Project Server 2003 to a large enterprise.

One of the big ongoing headaches has been performance support. For example, a user has a question on how to do something. If you've ever tried walking someone through a MS Project activity over the phone, you understand the joy. Even though Microsoft has improved help with Office Online, sometimes you just have to see it done.

To address this situation, we've been using a free PowerPoint add in called Microsoft Producer. This allows us to create a 2 minute walkthrough of an answer to a question. We then publish this to our support SharePoint site. In effect, you are creating a Visual FAQ. Overall, the response has been very positive since so much more information gets communicated via this technique.

My grand idea (that I never have time to work on) is to take the Project Guide and to modify it to show you the faqs available based on the screen that you are being shown.

If you wanted to push the content to the local workstation, you could use a SharePoint RSS Webpart and some podcasting software and push this out to people overnight as you develop the content. Again, I think podcasting could be used for training video updates.

More info on Producer can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/prodinfo/overview.mspx

I've also been very impressed with this product and OneNote. More on that later.