We're geared up to deliver a great product release on Saturday November 21.  With new features making it easy to personalize content and manage communication preferences, we're certain you'll find something you need!

In addition to the features we announced in our recent newsletter, there are some other changes I wanted to share with you.

First, for those of you looking to track additional data on your users, you'll be pleased to know we've added 6 new custom fields to the user profile.  These can be used when adding or editing a user profile, and can be populated when bulk uploading users.

Next, we've made it easier for you to add questions that retain the look and feel of the presentation you are working on.   Now when  you upload a presentation, we'll look to see if it contains a slide background design. If it does, we'll automatically add that background to your question background library.  In addition, once you choose a question background in a presentation, we'll remember that choice and continue to use it for additional questions added to that presentation.

We hope these little 'extras' will make your experience with Brainshark that much better - enjoy!

Kristin

Not taking advantage of Brainshark's completion criteria?  Why not?!   It's easy to set a minimum bar of how much audio your viewing audience is required to listen to, how many slides they must view, as well as what score they must achieve on examination questions.   Authors can easily set completion criteria right from the Presentation Properties tab.

So now that we're all excited about completion criteria - let me tell you about how we've made it even better!  We now offer a completion indicator that can be displayed on the Brainshark player, so your viewing audience is aware of their progress.  You can even choose to share with them the details of their progress, either by making the new indicator a link to a summary of their completion status, or by using our branching feature to link to their results when complete.  

We invite you to check out these great updates available on September 11 (as well as a shiny new 'Users by Folder' report) by viewing the following Brainshark:

Enjoy the updates - and keep that feedback coming!

Kristin

Have you heard the news?  The latest release of Brainshark is now available!  We're so excited to continue to offer improvements and enhancements to our product.

For this release, we introduced the "Add a Photo" feature, making it easy to enhance you presentations with a variety of photo formats.  We've also improved the handling of document slides, making it easier for your viewers to seamlessly review your content.

With these great improvements, as well as updated reports and video enhancements, we think you'll be as excited as we are!  Check out the latest enhancements by reviewing the Brainshark below.

Enjoy!

Kristin

There are many screen recording tools available on the market today. They tend to vary greatly in terms of cost and functionality. For those looking to enhance their presentations by adding screen recordings, Brainshark has an easy to use, affordable solution!

We are pleased to make available the TipCam for Brainshark. We partnered with uTIPu to offer our customers this incredibly user friendly screen recording tool. Also, we've done some integration so that you can upload your captures directly to Brainshark!

If you are interested in purchasing a license of this tool, please click here. For more information on how it works, including a sample screen recording, please view the following Brainshark presentation:

Happy recording!

Kristin

Last week we launched the latest release of Brainshark to our customers.  This new release includes many terrific features, including support for Single Sign-On (SSO), a new and improved Brainshark Content Network, the ability to upload directly from your content portal, and more!

If you haven't done so already, I invite you to check out our latest release.  You'll find all the details on our product page, along with a history of our last several releases in case you missed anything.  And, we've added a "What's New" link from the product navigation so you can always visit the product page to learn the latest news and updates.

We have gotten some very positive feedback about the latest version of Brainshark and would love to hear from you as well.  Please email us any comments or feedback that you'd like to share.  We hope to hear from you!

Kristin

From time to time I'd like to use this blog to remind our customers of some of the great but lesser known features available in Brainshark. Today I thought I would start with Question Branching.

Some use cases may include:

• Sales & Marketing -- You have a suite of products or services and you want identify what the prospect is most interested in and direct them accordingly.
• Training -- A student incorrectly answers a question and you'd like to direct them back to the content to review it again.
• HR Onboarding -- You want to direct a new employee to complete forms that are relevant to them, so you may want to ask them questions about their interest in participating in certain program offerings.

These are just a few of the ways that you might use Question Branching. Based on their response to a question, you can redirect viewers to another point in the same presentation, to an entirely new Brainshark presentation, or to a designated URL.

You are able to set-up branching when adding or editing a question in your presentation.  In the example below, I have chosen to branch the viewer to a different point in my presentation that corresponds to the product offering in which they are most interested:

For more information on using questions and branching in Brainshark, please click here.

Kristin

p.s. Do you have some suggestions for features you'd like to see discussed on our product blog? If so, please email the product team with your feedback.

• Do you have a library of old corporate videos and need a way to repurpose them?
• Are you creating product demo's using screen capture tools and looking for a better way to add your voice and distribute them?

Why not use Brainshark to host your video files? You can easily add video to an existing Brainshark presentation, or just upload a video file to create a new Brainshark. It's as simple as choosing the new 'Upload Video' link under the Things You Can Do menu.

With our February release, we announced support for FLV videos in addition to our existing support for SWF videos. What does this mean? If you upload videos in these formats we can play them right in the Brainshark player. That means your viewers can easily pause or play the video, and advance and rewind to points in the file.  

You may also continue to upload alternative video types. These however will attempt to play using a video player on the viewer's computer. We are actively working to enhance our video support so that we can accept any common format and play it in our flash player. More to come!

For more information, check out our best practices for using video.

Kristin

p.s.  In case you didn't hear, we increased our file upload limit to 100MB in our March release.  So what are you waiting for?  Let's get those videos "Brainsharked" today!

You've found us!  The Brainshark product team decided it was high time we had a blog of our own.  We intend to use this as a forum to share insights into our product roadmap and planning; introduce you to product updates; and respond to your feedback and product related inquiries.

If you have other topics of interest that you would like to see the product team address, please send us your feedback.

We're looking forward to taking advantage of this great new communication channel!

Kristin