Get a lift from your next training video

Like a lot of IT departments, ours could do better at training, especially for new deployments, so when we switched the way we booked conference rooms, we wanted to make an effort to better educate our users. We are a global company and decided the best way to do this was to video someone booking a conference room, and we'd add a voice-over explaining what they were doing. Pretty basic stuff. I found a new beta

Like a lot of IT departments, ours could do better at training, especially for new deployments, so when we switched the way we booked conference rooms, we wanted to make an effort to better educate our users. We are a global company and decided the best way to do this was to video someone booking a conference room, and we'd add a voice-over explaining what they were doing. Pretty basic stuff.

I found a new beta tool from Microsoft Office Labs called community clips that did exactly what I wanted. So using my trusty laptop, I quickly put a video together, posted it on our intranet, and sent out the corporate e-mail announcing it was there. I was pretty proud that we had done a decent job of training, patted myself on the back and didn't think too much more about it.

The next day, as I poured my coffee, one of my coworkers came up to me and asked, "What’s up?" She laughed and walked off.

"Hmmm, that was odd," I thought to myself and promptly forgot about it, but as the day wore on I got more bizarre comments.

"Hey, I loved your video."
"Good to see you get spam too."
"I guess you had a good weekend."

Finally one of the technicians from the help desk called and said he was still laughing about the video.

I like to think I'm pretty witty, but I couldn't remember putting anything in the video that was funny so I went back and watched it. Halfway through the video an outlook alert popped up for new e-mail. I watched in horror as "Your Viagra has shipped" appeared in the corner of my screen.

That's why you should always use a demo laptop and account when you record training videos.

I was going to redo the video but instead told the help desk to let everyone know I'd put that in on purpose to see who was watching the training. So far no one has pointed out that I could also just look at the Web logs and see who watched the training.