We have been using Windows Media Services to multicast to our 1500 user campus
with great success. We've been asked to move to the web and make our material
available via streaming to a much wider audience. Flash streaming seems to
have everything we need but we honestly have no idea how to get started. Is
there (SOMEwhere) a simple Step-by-Step "Getting Started" document that will
walk us through our first video stream. We do both live and archived streams
currently (multicast) so I'm happy with using a live feed or archived files. I
just need some simple instructions. My Windows Media experience doesn't seem
to help at all. Thanks.

Yeah... using FMS and Flash is a huge departure from other streaming formats.
The biggest difference is that there's no "default player" or anything like
that. You need to build a .swf that will be your client app, and the .swf makes
the connection to FMS.

Here are some basic samples that should help get you started:

http://blogs.adobe.com/dreaming/2006/11/fms_resource_center.html

Also, you might want to pick up a copy of "Programming Flash Communication
Server" (O'Reilly). Lots of really good info in there.

I'm hoping the site you suggested and the samples I downloaded will make sense
to my colleages that already use Flash. I have high hopes for that...they're
Greek to me.
Is there ANYwhere with a simple, 1. do this 2. do that 3. do this next
sort of user's guide to FMS for absolute idiots like myself? Thanks.

Anyone with a solid background in Actionscript (and some background in
server/client communications) should have no problem gettng started with FMS.

As far a simple guides... I don't really know of any. The thing with FMS is
that by itself, it does very little. Most other streaming servers do most of
the heavy lifting for you, where FMS wants you to tell it what to do (hence the
complex scriping environment). The examples I linked to are about as
straightforward as I've seen.