Confusion Is Our #1 Enemy

In 2015, we changed the name of the company to VisualSP since our product had become our flagship delivery system for our content. When Microsoft made the turn to SharePoint Online and Office 365 in 2016, we also made a turn with them and released a new version of the product which ran in the browser. This was the birth of the product as it currently stands today.

We then expanded our focus to support any enterprise web application in addition to Microsoft applications. We also realized that learners respond to different types of learning methods. So in addition to videos, we started supporting many different types of microlearning including  walkthroughs, tip sheets, animated images and more.

In 2011, we were seeing a trend. Our customers were telling us that it was difficult for them to motivate their users to go to a destination site, a knowledge base, where the videos were hosted. They asked us if there was a way to provide their users with these videos in context of their environment. That’s when we started sketching out a plan to deliver the videos directly through the SharePoint on-prem ribbon and to users in context of their environment. We called the product VisualSP and released it in 2012.

In 2009, many customers and prospects started asking us to create videos for their end users. We created dozens of videos directed to the end user. These were each 10 minutes to 20 minutes long. The problem that we soon discovered was that end users did not learn the same way as developers and administrators whom we were used to teaching. The videos had to be short and to the point for end users to be motivated enough to watch them. They did not want to be trained, they instead wanted to be helped with the problem at hand at their moment of need. So we made a package of 107 videos. Each two minutes in length and extremely focused on a specific functionality that end users needed to know about.

In 2005, Asif Rehmani started teaching in-person classes on SharePoint 2003. Classes were focused on developers, administrators and power users. Asif was teaching these classes all around United States with an average class size of about 25 people.

A year into the teaching, it was very apparent that same types of questions in the classes were coming up again and again so Asif and his fellow teacher, Wendy, started recording answers to those questions using Camtasia in the form of a screencast (a screen recording showing the answer) and started posting them on a site Asif registered called www.sharepointscreencasts.com. That was the beginning of the online presence for the company. Sharepointscreencasts.com changed to sharepointelearning.com and then to sharepoint-videos.com. The company specialized in teaching SharePoint through online pre-packaged video courses.