About the Author

I’m an IT businesses entrepreneur, a software developer, and a huge technology fan. My company went to market in 1990, focused mostly in custom software development. We started with COBOL as our main programming language, and we’ve been evolving through the years up to .NET and Office technologies. Throughout these years, some of my main activities have been research about cutting-edge technologies, and searching for new tools that can help us to automate some or all processes regarding our products’ development lifecycle.

Perhaps one of the most time-consuming tasks we’ve been dealing with during these years has to do with customer support. In most of our business scenarios, we deal with people who have no good understanding of technology, sometimes not even a clue. So the learning curve when a software solution is being implemented becomes long and tedious, and consumes more time and money.

After a series of brainstorming and discussion meetings, my team concluded that delivering videos, along with the solution’s user manuals, would be a good way to cut users’ learning curves. These videos would display the most common use cases of the solution being implemented in short periods of time, and would be available for all users.

Once the solution for our problem was found, the question that came up was: What tool would be the right one for doing this? One of my core functions in the company is to research tools and new technologies that could help us improve our products and services. So I assigned myself the task of searching for the ideal tool in order to succeed in video making.

I found several open-source tools during my search, but none of them offered a complete solution for what my company needed. Besides, almost all of them lacked reliable documentation. I found commercial tools that fulfilled my needs, but some of them were a little bit expensive for our budget, and in some cases demanded the acquisition of additional hardware.

Finally, I looked into Camtasia. The tool offers a powerful video and audio editor that works in a common desktop computer, with no additional or special hardware. Also, a computer screen recorder and a series of great features come with the application. There are versions for both Windows and Mac, which allows us to use the same tool in a mixed-computers environment. Furthermore, Camtasia is very affordable at under $300 USD for a single user—a reasonable amount of money according to our financial plan.

The results obtained from Camtasia have been great, and allowed us to save a substantial amount of money in the past year. This money savings turned into a new Digital Contents Production Department, which is now starting to make money for our company.