No one has time for training. And let's face it, even if attorneys and staff did have time, they'd forget what they learned unless given an opportunity to implement their newly acquired knowledge within a fairly short time frame. But how can you successfully introduce new services, even something fairly straightforward, if you can't get your user's attention long enough to show them how to use them?
Offering just-in-time training can help, but trainers can't always be available at a moment's notice.
One option is to record short training sessions, and make them available on the Intranet. Then your users can get help at any time of the day or night, at the point of need. I've used a screen capture tool called Camtasia for this purpose.
According to a recent article, "Multimedia Desktop Training Comes of Age" (Peer to Peer - Nov. 2003, by Edward Jorczyk), Morrison and Forester uses Qarbon's ViewletBuilder to created animated demonstrations. MOFO has over 100 presentations available on their Intranet for attorneys and staff.
You can even use such ubiquitious tools as Powerpoint, complete with recorded audio.
Some vendors are also offering training via the web. For example, Westlaw has three web training courses. (TIP: Scroll down and you'll see that you can get a free Starbucks card if you take the "Using Westlaw" course. I'm so there.)
When you find these sessions already provided for you, make sure to link those to your Intranet as well.
I'm surprised that more vendors don't provide training videos on their web sites. Until they do, you can be producer, director and star!
Does everyone in your firm have the Camtasia viewer installed? I have Camtasia but haven't made extensive use of it, and I'm wondering how you've handled that aspect of the equation (broadcast installation or one-by-one).
Our Training Dept. has a product called RoboDemo and they've offered it to me for CBT "traininglets" on the next version of our intranet. I *think* it saves the clips in standard formats.
Camtasia allows you to save your video file in a number of different formats, including
AVI
Macromedia Flash (SWF)
Macromedia Flash Video (FLV)
Windows Media (WMV)
QuickTime (MOV)
RealMedia (RM)
Executable (EXE)
Animated GIF
I use the streaming Windows Media format.
You can use the Techsmith Codec for video compression, in which case you would need to distribute that to all workstations, which we've done. But you can use Windows Codecs as well.