We try to stay on top of interesting – and useful – technologies here at Blue Fish and we recently ran across something every Alfresco client should take a look at, particularly if you have struggled with user adoption or training for a large group of users.

TourGuide for Alfresco is an interactive training and support tool that guides users through Alfresco with step-by-step instructions while they do their work. By providing in-context task guidance directly within Alfresco, users learn by doing and are able to learn while actually accomplishing their task. Basically, TourGuide allows you to add a tutorial right on top of the Alfresco application.

We think this is a game changer because, these days, no one can afford to do classroom training for general users and most users do not have the patience to walk through a separate on-line training course.  Even if they did have the patience, they typically don’t retain the information for infrequent tasks.  We think TourGuide is most valuable for helping users with complex tasks they do infrequently.

Here are some of our favorite TourGuide for Alfresco features:
▪   ‘On Demand’ Access – User guidance with TourGuide means support is available on demand, providing information to users when they need it most, at the pace at which they learn. Whether that means viewing a whole tour, or just a quick tip to recall the next step.
▪   Task Guidance – Task Guidance keeps users on task, training them within the application to maintain productivity while they learn, meaning training is more effective than traditional online training and WAY less expensive than classroom training.
▪   Role-based Tours – Role-based topics ensure users see the tours and guides related to their specific tasks and duties, so that each department or process group is able to access a collection of tours tailored for their needs.
▪   Cross Domain Tours – Cross application support means guidance will follow complex processes across different applications guiding users outside of Alfresco, as necessary. TourGuide can take you from Alfresco to a separate web application and back again.  This is very cool!
▪   Custom Tour Creation –  It is easy to create custom step-by-step guided tours to support your unique business processes and keep all of your users on the same page.
Check out TourGuide and tell us what you think.  You can see more here.