Clarify – Today is a dark day

As a professional, there are those magical moments when you come across a system, technique or app that just works. It doesn’t just works, it works exactly as expected. It crushes those pesky expectations and everytime you produce a product using it, you feel as though you’ve bettered yourself, your peers, your clients or all of the above.

Clarify, my dear friends, is that app for me.

As an educator and working with IT, explaining how to perform tasks is a daily occurence. Whether I am working with administrators and the schdule or students on how not to reply all to an email, I and the IT team are needed. Clarify allowed us to work smarter. We could prempt these problems by using Clarify to make step-by-step instructions. Not only could you make these instructions, easily and quickly, but then you could upload them to Clarify’s server, so you could email out a link, embed it into a website or heck even export as a PDF or Word file. It was awesome.

The app itself is awesome, but Clarify’s awesomeness didn’t stop there. Oh no. Their support was second to none. A couple of years ago I upgraded to Clarify 2 and was having some issues with it. I emailed their support. None other than Trevor DeVore (co-founder) emailed me back. It took about a week and a lot of work (mostly on Trevor’s part) to pinpoint the problem, but it turned out to be a third party app that wasn’t playing nice with Clarify. Most tech support teams would have given up (beliveve me I know) after the first couple of solutions didn’t work, but Trevor kept at it until it was working.

Clarify is a product of Blue Mango Learning and they make a “grown up” version of Clarify called Screen Steps. It is definitely more tailored for larger companies for their training purposes and apparently that part of their business is growing pretty well because they are just in a position to dedicate the amount of time needed to keep Clarify supported and to keep their servers up and running.

You can read their reasons from their blog here.

You can’t blame them, there are only so many hours in a day and instead of letting a service sit their and fester with the “appearance” of support. They are stepping away from it.

Mark my words people, I will use Clarify until the wheels fall off. I’m thankful to the people of Blue Mango for their work and support and having the great idea of creating a program to develop step-by-step instructions for everybody.

Whoever (if anyone) steps up in this niche market – beware! You have some big shoes to fill.

Source: IT Babble Blog and Podcast