In Office Support Tools

Are you  in charge of creating your organization’s employee manuals and other support tools? You may want to consider adding Video support to your portfolio. There are so many tools out there that will allow you to accomplish this, it is very hard to make the choice of the right ones to use. Let me make a few suggestions for you to look at.

TechSmith is a company that has been producing software to help educators and support personnel to provide simple, professional looking video for quite a few years. I use several of their products to help me produce my   How To  Videos as well as short videos I use to respond to my clients at the office.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but what is a video worth? I said I used several of TechSmith’s tools and this first one I am going to talk about is free. The Jing Project is a program that is offered by TechSmith that will integrate back into  their other products. Jing has two components that will help you with your presentations. The first is a static screen capture. In Windows 7 you have that component as part of the operating system but you if you are not running Windows 7 you are missing it. There are many times when I am working with an article or proposal that I need to be able to capture part of screen display like I did with all of the images on this page. It is so much easier to be able to call on Jing to capture a little bit of the screen real-estate that I want to include without having to come back and work with my cropping tools to get it just right.

The second component of Jing is it’s video capture. While this may sound like the same thing, it most assuredly is not. With Jing I can capture all of my screen changes and narrate the subject matter at the same time and produce a quick, up to 5 minute presentation on the fly. The only negative, you have to do it in one take or begin again from scratch.

Camtasia Studio is the paid version of Jing on steroids. This product lets you take the next step  forward and create content with much better focus and give you the ability to tie multiple videos and stills together and to overlap them all with a narrative that you can add after the video collection is complete. The big difference here is that ability to edit your video.  Camtasia Studio will allow you to take video that you capture with Jing, Camtasia Studio or from some other static image or video sources and work with the content to achieve your creative result.

This leads me to the last component of the TechSmith Family that I use called Screen Cast. If you sign up with Screen Cast you will be able to easily store and serve up you video creations to the inhabitants of the Wild and Wooly Web (WWW). 

So if you are interested in seeing these programs in action, don’t hesitate making an appointment with me to see them. I will be more than happy to show them off and help you decide if they are the right fit for your business.