1. Adapt for complex scenarios Some procedures are straightforward while other procedures include a lot of "if this, then that" situations. If your documentation needs to explain a complex procedure, make sure you account for all of those variations.

Since the goal of a how-to guide is to allow customers to help themselves, most businesses only think of documentation in terms of how it will impact their customer support. But your how-to guides and documentation can also communciate a lot about your business. Whenever I am getting ready to start using a new product or service, I instantly look at the company's help site. Granted, I develop online documentation software, so I am probably a bit more aware of this than others, but a company's help/documentation site can tell me a lot about what it will be like to work with them. Here are three things I know about you if you have a great documentation site: 1. You are organized I have never seen a disorganized company put together a great documentation site. A great documentation site sends a clear signal about how organized your company is. A great example of this is the Van Halen Brown M&M's. Van Halen used to have a rider in their contract that required the promoters to provide a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown ones removed. A lot of people thought this was just them being divas. But Snopes explains the real reason:

Several nonprofit organizations struggle when it comes to effectively training staff on how to use Salesforce, and increasing user and management adoption. In a recent blog post on the 4 key challenges nonprofit organizations face when implementing Salesforce, Sam Dorman noted that: Even when the technical side is done well, it can still be hard to get staff to actually use the system...in fact, staff adoption shows up as one of the most significant challenges across all types of organizations." I'm going to share 3 tips that can help you improve your Salesforce training, and then show you a Salesforce integration that will completely overhaul your training program and boost user adoption---and we're giving it to nonprofits for a fraction of the normal price.

Do you ever get tickets in Zendesk that ask three or more questions in the same ticket? They can be a real pain to manage because you can lose track of which question is answered and which is still unresolved.

Back in 2010, Greg wrote an article about his experience purchasing software from MacHeist, called "Build the Ark Before the Flood." His experience with developers who sold their software through MacHeist had not always been great - mainly because they clearly weren't prepared for the volume of support requests that were going to come their way. A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to be on the other side of the MacHeist fence - our app, Clarify, was featured as part of the MacHeist NanoBundle 3. It was our chance to really put to test the support processes we have established over the last couple of years.

I was looking at a recent bundle from StackSocial and was just about to purchase it so that I could get one product - but before I made the plunge, I wanted to read some reviews to see what others were saying. Some reviews said that the program crashed all the time. Okay, that's a problem, but it's not a huge issue because bug fixes come out all of the time and that matter could quickly be resolved. But then I saw another review that sort of caught my attention - "Beware of any company that has this level of service (none)." Oh my! Well, one review can be ignored, right? But then I saw another review - "You will never get any support." And then another... and another. Well... that did it for me. I don't really have time to work with an application that doesn't have any support.

Somebody approached me the other day asking for some assistance with creating documentation for internal procedures and processes. I asked why they wanted to start documenting, and the answer was very interesting. "I've already been burned twice - I don't want to get burned again." After some explanation, I learned that on two occasions, key employees had left somewhat hastily - along with them went all of the operational knowledge for doing their job. Hiring a replacement was almost impossible because nobody knew what the replacement would do - so before anybody could be hired, the individual I was speaking with had to figure it out from scratch... twice.

Spring is in the air! The weather is warm, the flowers are in bloom, and my allergies are driving me nuts! Despite my allergies, I love this time of year because it's full of hours by the pool, food off the grill, and one or two vacations. Although... you know what I've been noticing the last few years? More often than not, I end up having to do work during my time away from work! And that's no good. A vacation is no vacation if I'm accompanied by office tasks and responsibilities everywhere I go! So even though the trend seems to be leaning more and more to making vacations workactions, I'm not accepting that fate. And frankly, neither should you! To help you take a real vacation this Spring or Summer, I've outlined 7 steps that will prepare you to make it happen.

Nobody can build and grow a successful business alone - we all need help. But knowing that fact isn't going to solve anything - you have to do something about it! In my last article, I showed you how to get started with oDesk (one of many great websites for out-tasking). So now that you have your account, I'm going to help you start out-tasking and/or outsourcing your work. Today's article is going to show you 5 steps that will help you filter through your tasks and identify which activities need to be done by you, and which activities you can start delegating to somebody else.