The Future (or Lack Thereof) of Clarify and Clarify-it.com

Posted by Greg DeVore

Update 1/30/2018

New Clarify licenses will no longer be available for purchase after Feb. 17, 2018.

We wanted to let you know that on March 1, 2018, the document sharing service associated with Clarify-it.com will be shut down.

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Clarify-it.com has been an optional, free document sharing service that worked in conjunction with the Clarify desktop software. As our ScreenSteps business continues to grow, we have found that we are not able to give the Clarify-it.com sharing service the time and attention it needs.

What will happen?

Starting on December 1st, 2017 you will no longer be able to upload documents to Clarify-it.com. Your existing content will remain, but you will not be able to add any more content to Clarify-it.com.

On March 1st, 2018 the Clarify-it.com service will be shut down and the site will be removed. Your existing content will no longer be available for sharing.

On June 1st, 2018 all images hosted on Clarify-it.com will be permanently removed. This means that if you were referencing those images in another platform (e.g. Salesforce Knowledge, Confluence, Help Scout, etc.) those reference links will appear broken.

What will happen to the Clarify Desktop software?

While it pains us to do this, the Clarify desktop software is going to move into maintenance mode.

We will continue to provide maintenance releases, but beyond that, there won't be further development of the Clarify desktop software.

This doesn't mean that you should uninstall Clarify–you will still be able to use it. And Clarify will still bring you joy when you have to document a workflow. It just means that there will be no more upgrades.

What do you need to do with your content?

If you are housing Clarify documents on Clarify-it.com, you will need to find a different option and move your documents off of Clarify-it.com.

If you are looking for a company knowledge base, then ScreenSteps can be a great solution. But unlike Clarify-it.com, it is not a free service.

If you are hosting images on Clarify-it.com, then you will need to make sure that you move those images to a different hosting service and update any references to those images in places where they are being referenced (e.g. Salesforce knowledge, Confluence, Help Scout, etc.) – otherwise, those images will show up as broken.

If your documents and images are on Clarify-it.com, but you no longer need them, then you don't need to do anything.

Why are we doing this?

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Over the last 2 years we have realized that we need greater focus in our business (you can blame books such as "Good to Great" and "Essentialism" as well as many industry conference sessions). Our real desire is to improve the way employee onboarding and training is designed and delivered. Clarify isn't well suited to solve that larger problem. But ScreenSteps is.

We know this isn't how you wanted things to turn out—we didn't want it to end like this either. But we believe that it is a necessary step for our business.