Question

Are you the one in your organization who is responsible for continuance or documentation? Do you have to train others how to do their job, or have you been asked to train someone to do yours? Do you ever have to troubleshoot an environmental problem on a system or give a presentation at the last minute?

Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) goes back to Windows 7 and Server 2008. PSR is a combination troubleshooting, assistance, screen capture, annotation tool that few IT professionals know about. You can use it to document your steps quickly with annotated screenshots and instructions. You can use it to troubleshoot an issue for a customer who is not as IT‐savvy as you. My favorite way to use it is to build documentation.

One of the best questions you can as your IT manager is, “What keeps you up at night?” When I am teaching, I try to learn as much as I can about my students' needs and goals. One of the biggest responses to the question about their security challenges is lack of documentation and continuance. This tool will help solve that problem.

In my experience, I have managed people new to IT who often ask the same questions over and over again. To empower them to find the answers, I created PSRs for repetitive questions like the following and store them on an easily searchable SharePoint site:

• “How do I add a static IP?”
• “How do I configure a network printer?”
• “How do I add a user in Active Directory?”

In Lab 2.2 , you'll use PSR.

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LAB 2.2 : PSR

1. To open Problem Steps Recorder, go to your Start menu and type in PSR . Press Enter. You will see a menu like Figure 2.2 .

   

   Figure 2.2 : Steps Recorder menu

2. Click Start Record.
3. Open your Calculator application, and on your keyboard, type 9+9 and press Enter. You should get 18 as the answer. As you clicked the screen or typed on the keyboard, a small red bubble indicates that Problem Steps Recorder is taking a picture of the screen.
4. Click Stop Record and wait to review your recording.

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To review the Problem Steps Recorder file you just created, in the upper‐left corner of the recording, you could click the New Recording button if this did not capture exactly the process you were looking for. If it is a file that you will want to use, click the Save button. When you save this file, it is saved in a .zip file by default. If customers/employees are having an IT issue, they can easily email you this file with all the contents for you to examine the issue. When you open the .zip file, you'll notice the file type is MHTML. You can right‐click and open this file type with Word and edit it until it reads exactly as you want it to for your continuance or documentation.

Each step recorded has a date and time and is annotated in bright green in the screenshot surrounding what you clicked. Examine your screenshots. In the first frame, your Start button will be highlighted in green with an arrow on it. The explanation at the top of each picture will tell you how the data was entered. When you're troubleshooting, sometimes input makes a difference.

At the bottom of the Recorded Steps page, there will be an Additional Details section. This section contains specific details about software and operating systems that only programmers or advanced IT people will understand. Review this to make sure nothing is in here that you don't want shared.

Have you ever been asked to present in a meeting with 15 minutes prep time? I'm good, but I'm not that good. If you are being asked to present on something that you can show in PSR, scroll up to the top of the page and click the hyperlink “Review the recorded steps as a slide show.”

There are a few caveats to PSR. It will look much more professional if you record on just one monitor. This tool will not record text that you type such as passwords; it will record only function and shortcut keys. It also will not capture streaming video or a full‐screen game. You may get a static picture, but this tool delivers a flat, one‐dimensional file. You are also limited by default to only 25 screenshots. If you need more than 25, you will have to go to the Help menu and adjust the settings. These settings will be temporary and not retained. They go back to the default when you close and reopen the program.

I have had professional IT students tell me this tool alone was worth the price of admission to class.