In ScreenSteps, you can include multiple images in one step. You probably only need multiple images in a step about 10% of the time, but it's handy to be able to have two images side-by-side when you need it.

We often get asked, "What's the difference between ScreenSteps and WalkMe?" In my last blog post, I showed you how WalkMe works with Salesforce, how to create a walk-thru, and shared some of its many features - so I won't cover that in great detail here.

Instead, I wanted to touch upon some of the differences between the two, focusing mainly on the Salesforce training use cases for ScreenSteps and WalkMe.

While we were at Dreamforce, we heard a lot of buzz about a web app called WalkMe. Several folks asked us whether our product, ScreenSteps, and WalkMe did the same thing. So I downloaded a trial of WalkMe and installed it on my Salesforce Dev account to see what it does. 

It might seem like a good idea for you to always be available and stand over everybody's shoulder to point them through screens - it's fast, it's friendly, and it gets the job done. But in the long run, it might be doing more harm than good.

The best kind of help documentation anticipates questions and problems that your users will have, and then makes the answers available right when your users have them. 

So making contextual help available to your users right in Salesforce can be a powerful tool when you're trying to improve how your organization uses Salesforce - but if it's not done right, it can leave you with the same hum drum results your PDF guides get as they continue to sit in the shared drive.

Here are a few things to consider as you create contextual help articles.

One of the most time consuming parts of a Salesforce Admin's job is answering emails from users with questions like "How do I log a case again?" and "What do I do with a duplicate again?"

Fortunately, this is also the easiest type of inbox filler to drastically reduce. Here are 3 tips for answering your Salesforce users' questions without having to actually answer your Salesforce users' questions:

Just the other day, I was forwarded an email from a friend whose colleague was in quite the predicament:

We are in the process of implementing Salesforce, but before we can roll it out organization-wide, we need to document how our staff members will use the system so that everyone is on the same page and data is entered and used consistently - unfortunately the consultants we engaged to handle the install have no materials to share.

Does anyone who uses Salesforce have documentation they can share with us? 

In November we spent a lot of time talking to Salesforce customers and consultants at Dreamforce '13.

Here is what we found:

1. The majority of consultants deliver some form of documentation to their customers.
2. Word or PowerPoint files are the most common format for the documentation.

There are two benefits to Word and PowerPoint files: Consultants are comfortable using them and everyone knows how to open them.

But those are the only benefits - the downsides to using Word and PowerPoint to deliver your Salesforce documentation are HUGE!

Recently, at the Dreamforce 13 conference, we answered a lot of questions about where ScreenSteps fits in an organization's overall Salesforce training plan.

This was our typical response: Training your team on Salesforce is not an event - it is a process. Your training program is only successful if your team actually uses Salesforce correctly to meet your business goals.

It doesn't matter if your trainees pass a test.

It doesn't matter if they give your course a 5-star rating.

All of that is irrelevant if they don't actually use Salesforce.

Three jobs your training program needs to perform

At it's very basic level, a training program must do three things:

Amee Cooper, Director of Change Management & Training at VMware, was one of the speakers during the breakout session titled, Go for Growth: How to Transform Your Salesforce Training Culture. She described VMware's Salesforce implementation and how the initial training was pretty manageable and effective - but over time, it didn't work very well and adjustments needed to be made.

WebEx wasn't enough

In the beginning, Amee was a team of one, and could send all of her communications via email and provide all of her training via WebEx. She would also provide recordings of the training sessions (something that she admits isn't very useful because nobody refers to them).

But as time went on, and VMware added new features and more staff, she noticed things were happening that weren't so great.