Tutorials overlaid onto live software applications??

Posted by bryanzug - 2005/10/17

I am back from presenting at the Cerner Healthcare Conference in Florida (hello humidity!). Got an interesting question from the lively Q&A following my panel presentation.

A clinical applications analyst (who is an RN) asked if any of us knew of eLearning systems that overlaid help or tutorials onto live software applications.

While I knew I had looked at one about a year ago, I could not recall the name of the product or vendor at the time of the session. Did a Google desktop search this AM and found it (that application is significantly increasing my daily productivity for finding info I know is somewhere on my machine, but is at the blurry edges of my recall)

Was thinking of the Epiplex (unfortunate name, I know — gives a connotation of perplexing epilepsy, which I, for one, do not associate with positive software system training experiences).

Had first heard of it mentioned in an article titled “Simulation-based Application Training: A Case Study” from Bersin & Associates December 2004 “What Works in E-Learning” newsletter.

Sounded like an intriguing concept and since Bersin seems like a pretty credible eLearning consulting organization, I scheduled a demo. Here’s the details of what I learned.

Epiplex is a product of a company called Epiance. It’s got a feature called ‘Desktop Assistant’ that is described on their website via the following –

Delivers Cue Cards, onscreen support for complex tasks and processes that guide the user through the application, encouraging and enforcing best practices.

If anyone knows of other products/vendors offering this kind of approach, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear about them.



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  1. Resource Bridge has actually done this in applications which enable anchoring within the frame of a page. Context sensitivity can be achieved by passing the page parameters via the Help button.

    Comment by RBridge — December 30, 2005 #

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