The Mind of a Virtual Mentor

Dan Gallo's Company Really Knows How to Manage Knowledge

Norwalk, CT, January 3, 1999 —Talk about 30,000-foot thinking. Dan Gallo's hot new software property, Mentor™, traces its history to the private jets of some of the world's leading corporations. It was at that rarified height that Gallo began his work as a hot-shot communications consultant preparing Fortune 500's leading CEOs as they traveled the world preparing for road shows that Gallo wrote and directed. Gallo always asked his captive audience a single question—"What's the number one challenge you face?" He always heard a similar refrain: "I can set the strategy and articulate the vision. But how can I make sure the message gets through to our people when our business is changing so rapidly?"

Enter VSI Communications Group's Mentor, a powerful new communications, learning and support tool that has secured more than one million licensed users at the world's leading corporations, including IBM, DuPont, Colgate-Palmolive, Duke Energy, Transamerica, GoodYear Tire and Rubber and scores of others.

Mentor takes the lament Gallo heard from leading CEOs and provides a way for them to deliver the company's vision, mission, and training directly to the desktop. Think of it as a virtual mentor of sorts—always residing just a click away on your desktop, ready to communicate a vision or support a task at hand to audiences separated by miles, countries and even continents. Already, Mentor has been adapted for the enterprise-wide communications, learning and support needs of such corporate stalwarts as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. And its impact is only beginning to be felt as ISPs, resellers, and some of the world's leading e-commerce Web sites learn its potential to educate users and dramatically reduce Help Desk costs—by anywhere from 20% to 40%.

What is Mentor?

Mentor is the world's first network-delivered, just-in-time, multimedia tool that allows corporations to simultaneously communicate the vision behind any initiative while empowering employees with the precise knowledge they need to best perform their jobs. Mentor tears at the fabric of traditional training models—those based on encumbering subjects with retaining and acquiring knowledge. With Mentor, retention isn't the goal. Rather, the goal is to make people successful by providing them information on the fly, as they need it and as questions arise.

"Mentor replicates the human learning process by providing just-in-time information and expert guidance that addresses the exact issue a user is facing," says Gallo, a former professional musician who started his company in 1985 as a communications firm and transformed it into a technology and content development firm. "It fulfills the very need that CEOs always talk about. It gives them a way to communicate and support their employees in a way that's much more powerful than the traditional training model."

Delivered to a desktop via the Internet, CD-ROM or housed on a local network, Mentor serves as a personal coach, always available, using multimedia power and bit streaming technology to give the user just what they need to know, when they need to know it. It delivers just-in-time sight and sound learning and performance support—at the office, in a hotel, with a customer, at the kitchen table, or anywhere a corporate network is accessible.

Each Mentor training module is delivered in real time, 30- to 90- second multimedia sound bites that allow users to answer any question as they are using the technology, working and producing for the corporation. There's no downtime such as is the case with classroom or even computer-based training.

The Key to Mentor's Success

Small, digestible pieces are the key to Mentor's success. Most people simply don't learn well through total information immersion. They need information broken down and delivered just-in-time as an issue, point of confusion, or question arises.

Mentor's compelling benefit is its ability to deliver filtered content, specific to the user, at the desktop, within the very software the user is learning. To do so, it relies on state-of the-art streaming and compression technology to provide a full multimedia learning experience. Users see on-screen the exact key strokes and mouse clicks that enable an operation. It's all performed in vivid detail, as if a company trainer were standing over the user's shoulder. Adoption and comprehension are greatly enhanced due to the relevancy and immediacy of the content. Just consider Mentor's track record:

In 1997, when Lou Gerstner, the no-nonsense CEO of IBM, completed the acquisition of Lotus, he decided to see how the migration to Lotus Notes was progressing within his own organization. He decided to test its adoption by sending a Notes e-mail to 100,000 IBM employees. Only a few thousand responded. The man who led the purchase of the world's leading and most widely used communications package found his own employees weren't even using the program. Dismayed, Gerstner countered by retaining VSI to develop a Mentor for Notes and make it available throughout the corporation to speed employees acclimation and use of the new software.

Mentor's Application

It's all about content. And because Dan Gallo and the people at VSI have been careful to position their company as a content provider, not just a technology company, Mentor ranks as a highly flexible learning and support tool that can be customized and used to meet just about any training initiative, including:

Mentor™for Lotus Notes

With hundreds of thousands of licenses in place, Mentor™for Lotus Notes is corporate America's preferred tool for mastering Notes. This network-based, just-in-time training solution offers more than 265 multimedia modules that, using audio, graphics and animation, cover all Notes functions, including Mail, Calendar, Scheduling, Documents, Databases and more. A proven productivity tool, Mentor™for Lotus Notes is currently in use by leading Fortune 500 companies.

Mentor™ for Outlook 2000

Recently introduced, Mentor™ for Outlook 2000 is a multimedia communication, learning and support solution that helps users quickly master the full functionality of Microsoft Outlook while reducing Help Desk and training costs. As with all Mentor versions, Mentor™ for Outlook 2000 can reside anywhere—on a network, intranet, Internet or workstation hard drive or CD-ROM, providing organizations just-in-time support for all team members.

Mentor for ISPs

A proven way for ISPs to cut Help Desk and customer service costs and to expand their market by helping new users succeed on the Internet. Mentors for Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Outlook Express teach and support users on browsing, e-mail, newsgroups and chat. ISP-specific custom Mentors help users through initial setup and help them understand and use the ISP's value-added services, all without calling a Help Desk.

Mentor™for e-Business

A completely customizable solution for Web-based e-business and e-commerce sites, Mentor™for e-Business offers Web sites an easy, inexpensive learning and support option guaranteed to reduce Help Desk costs while enhancing user value. Today, designers are forced to dumb-down functionality because they have no way to teach and support their users. Mentor™for e-Business allows them to include richer function, to make their sites more valuable to their own companies, and make sites stronger against competitors and stickier for their users.

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