It's amazing to see some of the great content being created with Brainshark. Our customers continue to push boundaries and produce rich, on-demand, multimedia content to promote their businesses, sell products and services, train employees, partners, customers - and so much more! It's no surprise that with so many companies using Brainshark as a key component to their communication strategy, that we announced our 25 millionth view. Phew! That's a lot of messages being shared with Brainshark!
With all that great content, it's important that you have an effective way to manage it and keep it fresh. Recently I co-hosted a web event with our VP of Products and Services, Greg Flynn, and we talked about ways to self-manage content. I wanted to remind everyone that we've enabled our archiving feature as a way to assist with this. You can choose to archive individual items, or set rules that will archive content that has not been utilized within a certain period of time.
We also announced the concept of auto-restore, which means if you archive 'active' content, or it is automatically archived based on your rules, it can be 'auto-restored' if a viewer attempts to access the content.
What does this mean for you? It means that if content is still in use and offering value, it will stay current, and take the manual content management work out of your hands. And what if you don't want content to auto-restore? Simply mark it as inactive and it will stay in an archived state, regardless of who attempts to view it.
Have other suggestions about how we might make content management easier for you? We'd love to hear them! Just email us at feedback@brainshark.com with your ideas.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Kristin
Did you know that
- 88% of those who participate in a live webinar admit to multi-tasking
- 97% of those who missed your webinar are still interested in the content of the presentation
- a 45-minute webinar can be recorded into a 15-minute Brainshark on-demand presentation
To learn about best practices for replays, the least understood element of producing webinars, click here to access the 12-page PDF. This is the first of a series of reports from the Brainshark Customer Experience team. The next one will be comparing personal video cameras from flip video and Kodak.
Elearning! Magazine Group's Annual Readers' Choice Awards Highlight Brainshark as ‘Best Rapid Development Tool'
View Press Release
We know that times are tough and we also know that communicating is important. So if you are finding the cost of customized cards and stamps to be too much for your holiday budget - have no fear - Brainshark is here. myBrainshark is a place where you can go and create customized Holiday cards for FREE! Watch this sample card below and then try it for yourself. Your friends and family will be amazed and you will have a few more dollars to get something special for those you love. It is our gift to you -
Happy Holidays from everyone at Brainshark!
The last Customer Connect Live on-line webinar of 2009 was a User Group meeting which covered three topics. The 2010 Sharkies for the Best Presentation of the Year, results of the Fall 2009 Customer Satisfaction Survey, and giving away 10 FlipCams. To view the highlights of the meeting
click here. Slides 4-6 relate to the Sharkie judging process.
To submit your presentation for the Sharkie Awards click here.
The winners of the FlipCams were from Xerox, American Express, Woodmen of the World, Sanofi Pasteur, Astellas, EMD Serono, Bank of America, Federation of State Medical Boards, and FSG-Impact.
Thanks so much for your participation and we look forward to working with you in 2010!
Hot off the heels of our successful October Advisory group meeting in Boston, we conducted the last Advisory group meeting of the year on December 2. Key discussion points were
1- How to let authors know about new features, ideas, great presentations.... particularly after someones logs in.
2- User Group meeting for October 2010. We are discussing either regional meetings or one annual meeting....more to come.
3- We will buy the Kodak version of the Flip camera and write a review with examples comparing how they integrate with Brainshark. This will be done by year end.
4- Most of the Advisory group were open to judging the 10 Sharkie winners to determine the Best Brainshark of the year. Click here to submit your nomination. Deadline is January 31.
5- Linked in. We will create a group for just the Advisory Group to communicate with each other and will either expand it for all customers or create another one. Lets see how it goes.
6- Looked into the question of the defaults regarding subscription to the newsletter when a new author is set up. Currently, all sites are set up so that new users are checked to receive the newsletter. The administrator setting up the user can de-select for a specific person. In addition, the recipient can opt out.
Did You Know: A site administrator can create a presentation about a new feature in Brainshark or an internal testimonial and set it up so that the next time an author logs in they will see it. We will look into sending out a link to all Brainshark administrators before a release so it can be made available this way.
Next meeting will be in late February...date to be determined.
It's a pretty typical use case... You have a piece of content that you want others in your organization to use. Perhaps you want to allow them to make it their own, by adding a welcome slide or by closing the presentation with their contact information.
But in order to achieve that today, you have to allow users to copy the entire presentation. That means anything goes! It also means, if you make important updates to the core presentation, those will not be reflected in any of those copies that have been created.
We are so excited to announce that we have a solution to this common dilemma. Now you can easily lock down your content but allow others to personalized by simply adding a front and back slide. But the beauty in this new feature is that the user is no longer copying your presentation. Instead, they are wrapping what you might consider a "pointer" to your original presentation. So if you make changes, their presentations get changed.
Imagine the power of that! How many times does Marketing need to change a slide deck, perhaps to update a customer list, or change product pricing. Now you can ensure that those changes are reflected in versions of your presentation that you've made available to personalize.
All you need to do is:
1) On the security tab of your presentation DESELECT the option that reads "Allow authors to copy this presentation"
2) On the options tab of your presentation SELECT the option to
"Allow others to add opening/closing slide"
It's that easy! Now your presentation cannot be copied, but it can be "personalized". Any author in your account that has access to that content will be given the option to personalize it, which means they can add a front/back slide of their choosing.
For more information on this and other functionality made available in our November 21 release, please view this Brainshark.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Kristin
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
In the first half of 2009, the Brainshark Customer Community team visited customers in San Francisco, New York City, Toronto, Houston and Dallas. Our primary objective of these city tours is to provide customers the opportunity to meet one another and share your stories. Recently, we've switched the format of the meetings by sponsoring lunches and adding both Brainshark and product update details to the gatherings. We've also extended our visits an extra day to make ourselves available to you for onsite visits. The feedback has been very positive from those we had lunch with this September in Charlotte, Atlanta, Omaha and Lincoln. And it's been rewarding to see people exchange business cards and schedule follow up conversations.
The last two lunches for this year will be in Hartford (CT) on Tuesday, November 10th and Denver (CO) on Wednesday, November 18th. Invitations will be coming out in mid-October.
Click here to register
At the October 7th Customer User Group meeting, we received nominations for next year in Phoenix, Houston/San Antonio and Chicago. I am thinking of Minneapolis and Toronto as well, but would love to hear your suggestions! Please feel free to comment or reach out to me.