Creating a virtual operating system

InsomniaCalls

InsomniaCalls

InsomniaCalls

Soldato
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Hi there.

I'm not really sure what I'm looking for which is no doubt going to limit the amount of help you can offer me!
I'll ask anyway and hope for the best.

My company are too tight to fork out for Vista licenses and unwilling to give the support team (some of which are only really just technical enough to get by) any sort of training or documentation on Vista or Office 2007.
Now fortunately I have it at home so I can write training for the team easily enough but it would be handy if they could see and interact with the areas they need to guide end users through.

Someone in the office knocked up a Vista walkthrough using images and hotlinks to get from one area to another but it isn't great and is fairly limited.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any software I could use to build a sort of interactive walkthrough so it couldn't be used as a workable OS but you could get from A to B and be familiar with environment.

A fancy load of screenshots basically.

I know this is far too vague but I've not get my head switched on today.

TIA

Si
:)
 
You mean creating like a slideshow thing showing the users what to do?

If you have Powerpoint you could create a slideshow consisting of the screenshots. And in fact you could set it up so that they have to click on a place or area of the screenshot to move to the next screen.

This all depends if you have Powerpoint. If not, OpenOffice might work.

EDIT: Damn, read it at first and then forgot you said someone already did something similar to what i'm suggesting. Not sure what else to try, sorry.
 
I have powerpoint but looking for more of an advanced tool that they can move from place to place with. Thanks for the suggestion though! :)

I'm not 100% but I have a vague recollection of being able to do it in Flash.
Could be talking rubbish though.
 
yeah, certainly using flash would allow you to create something similar. I've not used Flash in a while, think it was FlashMX i was using at the time.

Hell, you could use flash and shove it on a web server ;)
 
We had a setup like this when I worked in an internet troule shooting call centre. You could basically click on buttons like it was the os and it would show what would happen if you did. It was limited though. It was mainly so you could talk a users through excatly what they should be seeing.

Why are you troubleshooting an OS when your company dont even train you on it? Why dont they just not support Vista?

Or how about setting up logmein on your pc and then letting your collegues access it when they need to work something out?
 
I already have logmein on my pc but I use it for my own purposes! :p

We're supporting Vista and Office 2007 because apparently it's fine to say to a customer "Set up a network share, ensure everyone has full control, bla bla bla" but then expect the complete novices to go away and do it themselves without any help. :/
I've never spoken to a customer who can just do something.
It's always step by step guidance and if you take that away from them after years of that kind of support they'll throw a hissy fit. Quite right too.

It's just plain gash but they won't budge from their standpoint of
"We support the program, not the environment the program is installed in." Garbage if you ask me but I'm not losing my job arguing the point.
 
We do currently have VPC and I've given VMWare a shot (thinking of trying virtualbox) but with Vista being really resource hungry and our application being even worse it isn't feasible.
We only have 2Gb RAM on our PCs and to allocate half of that to a VPC is a nightmare.
Thanks for your suggestion though.
 
InsomniaCalls said:
Hi there.

I'm not really sure what I'm looking for which is no doubt going to limit the amount of help you can offer me!
I'll ask anyway and hope for the best.

My company are too tight to fork out for Vista licenses and unwilling to give the support team (some of which are only really just technical enough to get by) any sort of training or documentation on Vista or Office 2007.
Now fortunately I have it at home so I can write training for the team easily enough but it would be handy if they could see and interact with the areas they need to guide end users through.

Someone in the office knocked up a Vista walkthrough using images and hotlinks to get from one area to another but it isn't great and is fairly limited.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any software I could use to build a sort of interactive walkthrough so it couldn't be used as a workable OS but you could get from A to B and be familiar with environment.

A fancy load of screenshots basically.

I know this is far too vague but I've not get my head switched on today.

TIA

Si
:)
Click to expand...

Ok so your company wont buy vista licences, so how are they using it?

I think this is a joke, go to your boss and demand they use some money to support it. Either that or just don't support it and refuse to fix any issues with it.

Also you do know, if any thing comes off you using illegal software it will be the IT department that goes down.


Opps i see its your customers who are using it. My bad
 
Yeah, basically I work for a pretty big (FTSE 100) software company and they have about 3 Vista licenses available to tech support.
Obviously the developers have it but that isn't any good to us.

Most of the people on my team have never seen, let alone used Vista and Office 2007 with the Office button and Ribbon is even worse.

"Click on the Edit menu"
"What Edit menu?"
Click to expand...

So I need to give them something to go on as the managers obviously don't care what sort of shoddy support the customers will receive.

It looks like that Adobe thing might be a goer though so thanks. :)
 
We have the same issue in our office.... I just wrote an virtual app in dreamweaver; more time consuming than hard using the hot spot link and screen dumps...

The way I suggested getting around the use of the machines in the office, is to remote desktop into vista machines, its not been setup yet as the test network is a mess at the moment.
 
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