…  TechSmith dug up my (VERY) old license key!

Ten years ago, I was working in a government basement in suburban Maryland, testing Java code and writing step-by-step user manuals for the Treasury’s intra-departmental payments program. There were five different user roles with several dozen actions, and the customer wanted detailed, step-by-step instructions. With pictures. Lots of pictures. Each of those things averaged 300 pages. At first, it was miserable. I knew how to do Print Screen, then crop in Word. Tedious.

Then kind soul informed me of the existence of SnagIt and swore the license cost was totally worth it. It was – the whole manuals business started flying by.

Fast forward to this week. Once I get my test environment set up (thank you Dell/Quest for the long-running sample license for ActiveRoles Server!), I wanted to make good screenshots for you guys. I vaguely remembered using SnagIt back in that basement, and dug through my email accounts for something from TechSmith. Nothing. I went to their website and plugged in all the email addresses I still had access to. Nothing.

I then followed their instructions, filing a service request with the billing addresses I could remember using during the years at that job, and not two hours later, received a friendly response that they found my purchase record, but since it was for a REALLY old version, they were offering me the license key for the oldest one they still support, along with the same half-price upgrade rights to the current version.

So thanks, TechSmith. If you need to do a lot of end-user documentation, SnagIt will save your sanity. You can try it for free for 30 days, at which point you’ll be hooked.