Product Announcement: Content Panda – New Free resource to integrated SharePoint and Office 365 training

My friends at Content Panda have put together an amazing resource for your SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 environment.  They’ve done some really clever things and they’re giving away a perpetual free version.  There are paid options so you can add your own content and do additional branding and premium content, but there’s a lot of expert content in the free that’s already available and integrated.  If you want the panda to be a clippy or the wizard, you could do it.  So if you don’t love pandas, don’t let that stop you.

Let me start with more of what Content Panda is and why I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

“52% of organization users are introduced to SharePoint/Office365 with no training…” quote from “The Road to Awesome SharePoint Adoption in your Organization”

I bet the 52% surveyed organizations includes administrator and developer training.  In my experience the total percentage of users that are trained or have access to training inside the organization is less than 10%.  Seriously it’s sad how much SharePoint gets pushed at employees and they’re told to go figure it out or search google or youtube.  I’ve been there.

What is is?
Content panda is Inline, In-Context Help for SharePoint.  The help content is articles, videos, blogs, and rich content to help your users better understand how to be effective with using SharePoint.  The ultimate goal is to help train your users on the technology and increase adoption by increasing user satisfaction.   Content Panda embeds the most relevant videos for you to play along as you solve problems or get that little reminder of how to complete a task.  Users no longer spend hours on YouTube searching for the “right” video.(You don’t need to track down the Office/SharePoint question mark that often isn’t contextual or that helpful.)

What does it do?

Delivers the most relevant and curated help content available in the world exactly when and where you need it .  With Content Panda you now have your own personal search engine inside of Office 365 connected directly to Microsoft Bing web services.  We have hand-curated the most optimal keyword search terms so you never have to leave the software to find an answer to your questions.

Did you say Free?

The free version of Content Panda is available for anyone using Microsoft Office 365 – SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2013. Content Panda is an easy app to install and is activated with one click. It is immediately helpful and opens the door to thousands of the right answers you need on-demand, real time on a daily basis.  You will start to want some panda in every software program you use.

Figure 1: Content Panda in action…

Once enabled any menu item now has more information and context.  Simply clicking on the plus will provide answers on what the feature does.  It’s a SP 2013 App, so it meets all your 2013 customization goals as well.

Find more about the new Content Panda SharePoint and Office 365 app at ContentPanda.com.  They give free demos and would be happy to chat with you.  Heather Newman and Simeon Cathy are both super nice and happy to chat with you about your training and adoption strategies.