OK, so I was blown away this week by a feature inside of Windows 7 that frankly I had no idea existed...it's one of those hidden treasures that's not visible or start menu or searchable unless you use terms like, "snip", "steps", "recorder"...It's called Problem Steps Recorder. I've been using Windows 7 for 2 yrs now (or something close to that while on the beta program) and never realized it was there. That was definitely a RTFM dummy episode, but I'll survive.
Off topic...ok, so I'm a huge Microsoft OneNote fan, and I was looking for the native screen clipping tool that ships with Windows 7 for a colleague (BTW, that's called Snipping Tool). I don't use it because I love the functionality and clarity of capture provided by OneNote's capture utility and integration thereto.
OK, this utility, Problem Steps Recorder is now available on most legacy OS's as well: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=B72D3AC2-4352-4184-9992-E122DBB80883&displaylang=en
This thing lets you hit record, perform any array of steps on your desktop, add textual comments where ever you like, and press stop to generate a web archive (.mht file) compressed into a tidy zip. And this is an enterprise-ready solution as-is. Starting the web archive file spawns a detailed collection of image snaps and human readable commands performed during the session, not to mention an incredibly useful slideshow view, all in the browser. Microsoft got it right on this one! You can even define the granularity of screen snapshots captured and whether or not to include the screen image (for private data scenarios). Most important to me is that it's lightweight and fast.
With the Silverlight plugin, you can get a quick demo here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd320286
I can see huge advantages for QA resources creating an archive as needed to satisfy repro steps for the developer/designer resource...huge time saver, and with team foundation server 2010, this zip could be attributed to a bug item for posterity. I'm probably behind the 8-ball, but I'm stoked about this little gem and will be trying it out with my team.
2 comments:
Thanks for that! I can use that program in my work to communicate with clients ... Didn't know it was there either!
Big thanks.
Ahh, the Easter eggs Microsoft leaves for us. I tell ya, I was blown away with the feature set in this otherwise hidden utility.
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