Mandy Portman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:53 GMT

Thanks for all the great info on this site. We had been using Camtasia, but were looking for a replacement because we were not pleased with the recording performance. Our criteria was a product that could record full screen and save the content to Flash SWF files. After a ton of research and test driving a bunch of different trial versions of products we found a product from a company called Sentry Works. There website is http://www.sentryworks.com/. They have a free version that has no major restrictions on it (download what they call the Personal Edition). This product is VERY impressive, and it appears to be the only product designed for group environments with some specific features for help desks. For example, the Personal Edition has presence detection to detect machines to record, and has a very basic although handy IM interface to allow someone doing the monitoring to communicate with the person they are recording. You can either record, or you can also live monitor someone. I have used it to live monitor 5 or more people on a large LCD monitor it works quite well! It also appears to be the best on performance (it was the only product we tested that could handle large screen changes – they have a page on there website that records a quicktime video to prove it).

The only thing I can criticize is that the free personal edition does not have support for recording audio from a microphone (looks like you have to pay for that). Also the free version does not have support for callouts, although you can overcome that by using Flash for editing the recordings. In my opinion you can’t beat this product especially for the price. :)

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Mandy Portman