Workbooks are a familiar concept.  You probably used them at school to learn math or grammar or to build your first birdhouse.  In business they are the learning tool used in workshops and seminars with great success.  Workbooks lead the users by showing them how to get the job done.

Workbooks are a simple concept where information and guidance come together in an easy to follow along series of lessons. Those lessons provide the user with directions, background information, examples and steps to follow to accomplish a goal. Each participant typically has their own paper copy of a workbook so they can mark their progress and refer back to the materials at any time.

For nearly a decade as a product marketing manager in the software industry, I used the concept of the workbook to train my sales teams and channel partners, to teach SEs how to setup and demo new products and to guide reviewers and new clients to a successful start.  I used nearly every tool out there from PDFs to Powerpoint, from webinars to intranets, from partner portals to learning management systems.

None of these solutions offered the simplicity of the workbook. Some were too expensive and time consuming while others fell short of encouraging the user to get the job done.  Last year I put my head together with my co-founder and we came up with Zoomstra, our very own “DO-ing Management System” based on the simplicity of workbooks and now we are ready to share our solution with you.

Zoomstra takes the workbook concept and moves it into the cloud.  Accessible to anyone with a web browser, authors can create an interactive workbook once and then use it again and again.  Distributing “copies” of workbooks to users is as  simple as adding email addresses to a Zoomstra account.

Workbook users simply log into the web application to review lessons, watch videos, download files and make progress completing tasks lesson by lesson.  Best of all, the centralization of the workbook in the cloud makes it easy to keep workbooks up to date with real time updates.  The workbook author also has the ability to stay connected with the users and monitor overall progress and visualize the impact of their efforts.

We are excited to show you what we have created.  Just this week we completed our latest round of updates and fixes from our private beta and we are now making Zoomstra available to a larger audience including YOU!  We invite you to take a moment and watch our intro video or you can join our early adopters by creating an account and see how Zoomstra Workbooks can get your audience DO-ing!

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