End User Training apps for OneStream

OneStream has many great functionalities for your end users. And as a OneStream customer or partner, there is much information available to teach you how the system operates. But how do you train your end users? Preferably in a way that is user friendly and not too time consuming, both for you and the end user? The MarketPlace has two solutions, which combined will provide your end users with a range of training videos. How can you use these apps to train your end users?

By Marc Roest, January 2020

Of course, the Market Place is not the only place to train end users. Outside of the MarketPlace, there are a number of ways to acquire knowledge about OneStream as well:

  • OneStream Academy
    Contains hundreds of videos regarding basic and more technical topics varying from 3 to 30 minutes, also accessible via an App to view on your mobile or tablet.
  • Classroom training
    OneStream has different levels of training to learn the basics of the system or get deep knowledge about a specific topic.
  • Knowledgebase
    Contains articles about specific topics, only accessible after finishing the ‘Application Build’ classroom training.

 

End User Training apps in the OneStream MarketPlace

In the MarketPlace, you’ll find a wide range of end user training material. There is standard training material available for:

  • End User Excel Analysis training
  • End User Cube Views training
  • End User Workflow Training
  • End User Report Books training
  • End User Extensible Docs training

Al these downloads contain a PowerPoint presentation with exercises, a Word document with a user guide that can be customized to your own application and a PDF file with instructions for the trainer.

To allow your employees to adapt quickly to the system, there are 2 handy MarketPlace solutions available. Together they offer a number of video’s you can integrated directly into your workflow and make available to your users. These are the ‘End User Training-Videos (EUTV)’ and the ‘Train Me (TRM)’ solution.

In the User Training-Videos solution, you’ll find the following training videos:

  • General navigation
  • Using the Point of View (POV)
  • Using Cube View functions
  • Using Quick View functions
  • Using the GetCells function in Excel

 

Setting up the Train Me Market Place solution

To show these training video’s in OneStream, you’ll also need the Train Me (TRM) MarketPlace solution. I’ll show you how to set these solutions up within your own platform. For this blog post, Train me version 4.1.0 SV 100 and Training video’s 4.3.0 was used.

The downloaded zip file can be imported directly into your application:

After that, the Train Me dashboard is available in OnePlace-Dashboards. There, you can setup the solution by creating the required tables and launching the solution:

You’ll need two levels of technical set up for this solution. First, the general database server settings that apply to many Market Place solutions – and must be adjusted by your (technical) administrator/ installation partner if not done in the past. However, this add-in needs some additional technical set up. To allow OneStream to play MP4 files, some settings on the web server needs to be adjusted by your (technical) administrator or installation partner. Also, the IIS manager needs to be configured to recognize MP4 as a MIME type. This is described in detail in the installation guide.

How to configure Train Me

The navigation buttons for the solution are shown on the right top. The second item (Show Admin Page) let you manage your video’s:

The first step is to create categories for your video’s – if you have more than the default ones from OneStream. I’ve created one:

The video content you want to show needs to be available on the web server and can be copied to:

C:\Program Files\OneStream Software\OneStreamWebRoot\OneStreamWeb\Pages

Within the created Video Category, we can now create the Video List referencing to the Pages folder on the webserver (enter your own server name here):

In the WorkFlow Videos tab, you can link to video’s linking to a specific workflow step.

It is really important to use the fully qualified server name, otherwise the link will not work and show the user an error message.

In the Settings page the saved Workflow Videos are linked to the six steps in the workflow:

The last step is to assign the videos to a workflow profile. First, create a new workflow and then set the parent to the Home page of the TRM solution:

If required, the sub-steps (like Import) can be set to inactive or attached to a specific training:

From the workflow the user can now directly access the home page of the EndUser Training:

Or select the import step to see the video (in a larger format) that is attached to the import step:

Conclusion

Providing your end users instruction videos directly from within the OneStream workflow is really helpful when new users start using the system or during the onboarding of your new employee. The setup is quite straightforward. However, I struggled for a while to find the correct fully qualified url from our server.

Pros

  • Training video’s directly available to all your users worldwide
  • Standard video’s available from OneStream get you started right away

Cons

  • The solution cannot (yet) connect directly to videos within the OneStream academy.

The setup is described in detail in the documentation and for a pretty advanced setup there is no scripting required. Therefore, I classify this solution as Admin Configurable. Please see my earlier post ‘The OneStream Market Place in real life’ about classifications.

Let’s discover the OneStream Market Place together

Want to know more about the OneStream Market Place? In a series of blogs, we’ll delve into the details of the Market Place and the solutions available. In the blog ‘The OneStream Market Place in real life’ you’ll find more details about the basics of the Market Place. And in the blog ‘Why you get more out of your OneStream software with Task Manager (UTM)’, we discussed why the Task Manager is so popular.

Any questions or suggestions for a Market Place solution you would like to read about? Don’t hesitate to contact me!

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