Investing in new cloud software is hard. You want to be confident that you’ve found the right knowledge base solution, but you don’t know what the future holds for your company.
What if your company’s situation changes in the future? What if this new platform isn’t right a few years down the road? You don’t want to be locked into a contract that isn’t working.
Now, you’ve found ScreenSteps and you feel that it’s the right training and documentation solution for your company at this time. It will help you with your cloud implementation or major update in your company.
But there is still a part of your wondering, what happens to our content if we stop using ScreenSteps after our training or sometime down the road?
We get it. You don’t want to invest time and money into building a knowledge base for your training only to realize that you lose access to that work once you stop using our software. This is why at ScreenSteps you can always take your documentation with you.
As the co-founder of ScreenSteps, I understand the stress that comes with maintaining ownership of the content you create no matter where you host that content. You are the owner of your content that you create in ScreenSteps.
No matter how long you sign up to use ScreenSteps, we’ve created three solutions so that you to continue to have access to your documentation if you ever need to end your ScreenSteps subscription.
1. Export PDFs of individual articles or manuals
The simplest solution is to generate PDFs of the articles that you’ve created in ScreenSteps. This pulls all of the information from the cloud and organizes it into a PDF that you can store in a shared folder or print out.
Before generating PDFs, you’ll want to decide how you want to organize the articles. You can export guides individually (meaning one article at a time) or as complete manuals.
The disadvantage is your PDFs are not easy to edit. In fact, it’s often impossible to edit your PDFs without a PDF converter. If you do use a PDF converter, it is often difficult to use and the presentation is not as clean.
If you don’t anticipate changes to your policies and procedures in the future, this won’t be a problem. The PDFs won’t need changes over time.
2. Generate HTML files using API
If you’ve decided to move to another Content Management System (CMS), you can pull your documentation out of ScreenSteps in HTML files using our Application Programming Interface (API).
Using the API, these HTML files can be uploaded into another CMS or webpage. This maintains the information you authored in ScreenSteps. However, it won’t keep the design of the guides and some of the interactive features won't work in other CMS softwares.
If you haven’t decided on a new CMS at the time you leave ScreenSteps, you can still pull the HTML files. Then, once you’ve made your decision, you’ll have the HTML files to upload into your new system.
The disadvantage of using API to upload the HTML files is that you will need someone on your team with programming knowledge. If you don't have someone on your team, then you can hire a developer to help you. That person just needs the technical knowledge to work with API.
3. Move to a PDF-only plan
If you are concerned about losing the easy authoring and updating capabilities that ScreenSteps provided your team, you don’t have to cancel your ScreenSteps account.
Instead of leaving ScreenSteps, you can downgrade your account to a PDF-only account. This subscription level is cheaper if you are on a tight budget.
It allows you to keep all of the content you’ve already authored, but you keep the easy authoring tools that have helped you maintain your knowledge base content.
You won’t have to worry about your content becoming outdated or inaccurate. Your content authors will still be able to update the guides. Your team won’t need to learn a new system for authoring and updating content. The authoring process will be the same.
The difference is you will no longer have online performance capabilities. Since your team won’t be using the cloud knowledge base, they won’t have the search options, nor will they have access to the interactive guides. The guides will be exported as PDFs for use.
🔎 Related: 5 ways PDF guides help with cloud implementation (& how to create them with ScreenSteps)
Customize your ScreenSteps experience
When you are looking for new software, we know you want assurance that the solution you find will work. Ideally, it is a long-term solution that will be a part of your company forever. But what if the solution you find isn’t?
At ScreenSteps, we understand that every business decision is a risk. We want to set up our customers for success. It’s your decision where and with whom that success will be. It’s your decision how long you will work with us.
We make it easy for you to maintain ownership of your content both while you are using ScreenSteps (which we hope is for years to come), but also if you ever decide to move on.
While we have pay-per-month and annual plans for ScreenSteps, we recognize that every company’s situation is unique. Talk to one of our representatives to discuss a customizable plan that will work for your company.
