Announcing Regale - Create, Host, and Share Product Demos
We’re excited to announce the launch of our new product demo platform, Regale.
Some back story…
Back in 2019 our team was rolling off a little project called demos.microsoft.com (DMC) that they had been working on for a couple years. That site hosted the content for hundreds of demos across Microsoft Office, Dynamics, Azure and Windows; and was available to all Microsoft employees and Microsoft Partners. Users could download Word or PowerPoint guides that walked them through a demo and get access to live demo environments that were created automatically at huge scale.
While running DMC, we noticed something – most of the demos didn’t really need to be in a live environment – and some of them would just never work live. Either the setup was too painful, there wasn’t a way to load in the data needed to show something compelling, or it was overall too expensive to operate that many live environments.
In fact, we had already been creating custom web applications to demo some of the more difficult scenarios. They looked like the real application, but only certain parts worked, and more importantly – we could show whatever curated content we wanted, and the cost to host them was negligible compared to a live environment.
However, having a team of developers build a custom web application is still expensive, and time consuming. To make matters worse, as products changed, it was expensive to update these demo apps with the new changes. There had to be a better way…
With these problems in mind, we set out to build a solution that covered the major pain points we were seeing. We built the first prototypes in the summer of 2019 and started using them with some of our customers – to great success. By the end of 2020, most of our demo content work was this new kind of demo that we called Guided Simulations. “Guided” because there are (optionally) beacons that point out where to click, as well as annotations describing the scenario’s story. “Simulation” because you are building a simulation of the real product.
Fast forward to now, and we’re ready to release Regale to the world. We’ve spent the last 2 years adding more features to make the demos better, make building them easier, and make the output accessible. At the same time, we built a new demo portal for everyone, where you can host your demos, gather analytics, and share content with others inside your company.
Regale is fully battle tested and ready for you to build interactive product demos for your sales, product marketing, and customer success initiatives.
Head over to https://regale.cloud to learn more and contact us when you’re ready to get started!