April 14, 2010
Dear Everyone:
It's all coming back to me now.
Four years ago, in 2006, I was teaching people how
to use a
document management system called "Documentum".
By this time, our Information Management group had been moved
from Company Boring and Really Expensive Services (CBRES) to Company
Information Technology Company (CITC).
CITC had begun sending "nasty-grams" to the leader of the
Documentum Support team, asking why we were giving training when they
had a department that did that.
So I taught their person all about Documentum and
she sat in on several classes as I gave them.
Rather than conduct classes of her own, she decided to use the
course as an excuse to evaluate a new teaching product which I believe
was Adobe Captivate version 2.
Even if you've never heard of
Adobe Systems, you've
heard of Adobe. They are the
people who invented the "pdf" files.
(PDF stands for Portable Document Format.)
When you download a file from the
Internet, chances are it's a
pdf. What was so smart about
Adobe is that they made the
Acrobat Reader, the application that lets
you read a pdf, free. Gave
it away by the gazillions.
Anybody could download a free copy of the Acrobat Reader.
Anybody could upgrade to a free copy of the newer Acrobat Reader.
This gave people who wanted to make files available to the public
the incentive to buy the Professional application that included the
Acrobat Writer. Even
“Jeannie” had to buy a copy of the Acrobat Writer when a client insisted
they wanted a copy of a transcript in a pdf.
Turns out, Acrobat is not the only thing Adobe
made. They also made
Captivate, a software for creating
Computer Based Training (CBT).
The ITC person used it to create a CBT for Documentum.
Four years later, that CBT is still available for people who
want/need to learn how to use Documentum.
The only trouble is:
Documentum has been upgraded many times in the past four years and the
CBT has not.
Fast-forward four years and I'm now using the
newest version of Captivate to upgrade the CBT.
Which means going through all the training materials from four
years ago and updating them.
I haven't been using Documentum that much since we started using
Microsoft's SharePoint. It's
not like riding a bicycle.
You can forget how to ride a bicycle.
I know, I've done it.
These days I wouldn't try to get on a bike for love or money.
But as I’ve been going through the four-year-old
training materials, it’s all coming back to me.
Not that the basic functionality has changed all that much.
It’s the bells-and-whistles.
Like replacing the little glyph that looked like a blue circle
with the letter “i” in it.
It stood for “information”.
Clicking the little circle would cause the properties information screen
to be displayed.
I called it, “Mr. I-Button.”
During training, I would say, “Click Mr. I-Button, Mr. I-Button
is your friend.” They took
Mr. I-Button away. And the
Action Buttons. Gone.
Now everything runs from a right-click.
I can hardly say, “Mr. Right-Click is your friend.”
But the new Captivate will allow me to “film”
examples of how to use the system.
That makes up for losing Mr. I-Button.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Love, as always,
Pete
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