It was a thursday, around 7pm and just as I was leaving work I got a mail asking me for a user guide for a new software we rolled out for our embassy client in Amman. And they need to be trained and up and running by Sunday. Well, it was my fault since I totally forgot about creating a user guide. Happens I guess when your juggling multiple projects.

Writing a 20-30 page user manual with screen shots and all that would take me forever and would ruin my weekend too. So I decided to screencast it. I chose Camstudio. Its Open Source and it works! [link]

I woke up real early today and within 3 hours I created the user guides, converted them to flash, uploaded to the server and even sent out an offline version. Now I admit that a 40 MB guide is pretty big, but with the kind of bandwidth everyone has access to nowdays, I think its the best way to quickly train users.

I’ll know for sure on Sunday!!! :)