Arlie Walkthroughs in Commvault Cloud
Every now and again I see a new bit of technology that makes me sit up and pay attention, and the new guided walkthroughs included in Commvault Cloud’s AI-powered assistant “Arlie” is one such feature.
I got the opportunity to see Arlie in action at the recent Commvault SHIFT event in London, and this ability to do a live tutorial made me think “wouldn’t it be great if everything did that”. The walkthroughs can be started direct from your Commvault Cloud console- it’s not in a separate documentation site - and unlike a traditional tutorial video you are actually working in your environment.
In this example (see the original Commvault video for the full demo with narration) the user is shown how to check running jobs
by storage policy. Once the walkthrough is started, Arlie highlights the place on the screen you should be clicking and the options to select. You can choose to ignore the walkthrough advice,
and enter different values or choose different options, this tutorial information is simply overlaid on your screen.
Tool-tips on steroids might be one way to look at this. Rather than just telling the user what all the buttons do and requiring them to hover around the screen to find the right one, it’s guiding them to the right control for a specific task. There’s no longer a need to flick back and forth to a tutorial documentation page to find out what the next step is.
There’s a use here for both new Commvault power-users, who may be unfamiliar with the interface, and seasoned administrators who perhaps need a reminder on a rarely used feature. When new functionality is added to the platform, Arlie can guide both old and new users through how to operate the latest tools in the box.
I don’t see this Assisted Onboarding as a replacement for good documentation and training (and please don’t go practising in production, with great power comes great responsibility etc.), but it is an excellent way of supporting (re)learning of specific tasks and providing instruction within the user interface.