Is offline documentation software still a thing in a cloud-first world?
Most documentation software needs the internet to work. Open a browser extension, click through your process, and the recording, the screenshots, and the finished guide all get built on somebody else’s servers before you ever see the result. That’s the default for this entire category, cloud-first by design, and it’s worth noticing, because it means every screen you document passes through a third party’s infrastructure first. Offline documentation software works the other way round.
FlowShare is an offline documentation software. It runs on your own Windows machine, captures and processes everything locally, and needs no internet connection to capture a process or generate a finished guide. As of now, the company behind it is also certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022. Those two facts do different jobs, and it’s worth explaining both, because most vendors only ever lead with one of them.
What offline documentation software actually means
FlowShare turns the steps someone takes on their screen into a written, step-by-step guide automatically, while they work. Open your ERP system, click through a process the way you normally would, and FlowShare builds the documentation as you go, capturing each click, screenshot, labelling each step, and assembling a finished guide.
Being an offline documentation software isn’t a limitation bolted on for security-conscious buyers. It’s FlowShare’s whole architecture. Capture happens on your machine. Processing happens on your machine. The guide gets built on your machine. None of that requires a network connection, and none of it depends on a browser tab staying open and connected to a cloud service while you work through a sensitive process.
It’s also not a screen recorder. While it’s true that training video also only takes as long to make as the process itself, it’s not easy to update once a step in the process changes and nobody can search inside a video for the one step they forgot. FlowShare produces a written guide in roughly the time it takes to do the task once, and when the process changes, you update the relevant part of the guide instead of re-recording the entire thing.
Why ISO certification matters more than a badge
Here’s the part a lot of vendor trust pages skip past: the architecture is the actual security answer, and the certifications are a separate, additional layer on top of it.
What a secure on-premise documentation tool should actually do
A genuinely secure on-premise documentation tool answers one question directly: does using it require your process data to leave your network? For FlowShare, the answer is no by default. Guides are stored on your system or network, and nothing is uploaded unless you explicitly choose to export or publish it through the optional Portal.
This is also why FlowShare gets deployed in places a browser-based tool simply can’t go: manufacturing floors, government networks, and air-gapped or restricted environments where “cloud-based” isn’t an option regardless of how many certifications the vendor holds. Fully offline operation, with no periodic network calls at all, is available for exactly these environments.
How FlowShare Portal makes publishing a conscious choice, not the default
However, not every guide stays local forever. Teams often want to share a finished guide, publish it somewhere central, or hand it to someone outside the tool, that’s what the optional Portal is for, and it’s worth being just as precise about its architecture as we are about the desktop app’s.
For FlowShare Portal (which miraminds GmbH and Inc. hosts and operates), we handle secure access control of the cloud infrastructure, encryption in transit and at rest, monitoring, and backup. You’re responsible for account hygiene, user provisioning, and your own sharing decisions. The underlying cloud providers handle physical data centre security, hardware, and OS-level protection of managed services.
The distinction matters because the Portal is an addition to the desktop app, not a replacement for it. The desktop application does the documenting, entirely on your machine. The Portal is a separate layer for when you actively decide something should leave your network and that layer falls within the same ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification as the rest of the ISMS.
Where SOP compliance software fits in
For teams building out standard operating procedures specifically, the same architecture carries over to SOP compliance software use cases. A compliance-driven SOP often documents a process involving regulated data or restricted internal systems, which is precisely the situation where routing screenshots through a third party’s cloud by default is the wrong default to have. Because FlowShare keeps documentation local from the start, teams can build out their SOP library without that step being a separate security review of its own.
Take a manufacturing quality-control procedure, or a government records-handling process: both typically involve screens that show internal system names, case data, or configuration details that shouldn’t leave the building, let alone a third party’s servers. FlowShare captures that SOP the same way it captures any other process, automatically, while the person works through it, and the resulting guide never has to be reviewed for what it exposed to an external vendor along the way. For SOP libraries that get audited, that also means the whole set stays reviewable as internal documentation, rather than each guide needing its own note on where it lives and who else has access to it.
Is FlowShare ISO 27001 certified documentation software?
Architecture answers what the software does with your data. It doesn’t answer how the company behind the software governs security as a business, and that’s a separate, legitimate question.
miraminds GmbH and miraminds Inc, the companies behind FlowShare, are certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, covering the design, development, maintenance, and cloud operations of FlowShare, including infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean. In practical terms, an accredited third party has audited how the company manages risk, access control, incident response, secure development, and supplier relationships, and confirmed it meets an internationally recognised standard, maintained through annual surveillance audits.
Download the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate here.
Precision matters here, and it’s where a lot of vendor pages get sloppy. ISO 27001 certifies a management system: how a company governs risk, access, incident response, and supplier relationships. With its headquaters in Germany, miraminds also operates under GDPR, which governs how personal data is collected, processed, and protected. The two work together but answer different questions: one audits how the business runs, the other governs how personal data is handled.
For the full detail, including exactly what personal data FlowShare holds, how responsibility is split between miraminds, you, and the underlying cloud infrastructure providers for the optional Portal, and what falls outside the certification’s scope entirely, see our Security page. The certificate itself, our Data Processing Agreement, and our Technical and Organisational Measures are available directly in our Trust Centre.
Here’s what to look out for when picking an on-premise documentation vendor
If you’re comparing documentation tools for an organization that cares about where its data ends up, check the architecture first and the certifications second.
Most vendors want you to stop at the badge. Look further. A vendor can hold every badge on the market while still requiring your screens to route through their infrastructure by default, because that’s a product decision, not a governance one. FlowShare is offline documentation software from the ground up, and it’s now backed by an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification as well, which means both the product question and the governance question have direct answers instead of one badge standing in for both.
Want to try it on your own process?
If you’re in a regulated or air-gapped environment, discover what “on-premise by default” actually means with FlowShare. Talk to our team for an offline setup with online features locked down, or start a 7-day trial to see the capture itself first, online features included.
