Hello everyone! My name is Eric Hartmann; this is my first post. I am a multimedia designer / education specialist newly employed at the Arizona Supreme Court as an Education Specialist. I have been working in eLearning now for a couple of years building animations and interactives with Flash, uploading to an LCMS and delivering through an LMS. The Court has been using Authorware to build and publish our CBTs and, as some of you may know, Authorware is not supported on Windows Vista. Worse, Adobe will not give any information as to what they are doing with the product. The buzz is that the product is being phased out, but who knows. Of course, the entirety of the AZ Supreme Courts is migrating to that platform sometime near October. So we are looking to get away from Authorware.

So simply put, what are our options? We are looking for a similar build experience to Authorware, but something more streamlined and specific to eLearning would be great. We prefer to build content in Flash and import the .swf files, so we are looking for a tool that will handle (primarily): • user login • test creation, tracking and other metrics • certificate printing (in addition to allowing content assembly). We have been looking at OutStart Trainer (which does what we need, but is a bit clunky) - what else is out there? What are the experiences? How much does the product cost?

Thanks in advance!

My apologies for not answering your main question, but, in theory, Authorware Web Player will run on Vista.

See the article at http://support.plato.com/kb/tip.asp?psid=28112

Hi, I've been using Outstart Trainersoft for the past 3 years and have found that it is not the most "user friendly" system. It produces quality e-courses and quizzes but (not being a "tech person") again I find cumbersome to use. Good luck in your search!

I agree with that assessment. We have been running the demo for the last week and found that it came up 'just short' for our needs. The update they are releasing may address some of these issues, but for now it isn't flexible enough in the way it handles things like login and bookmarking, it has a problem printing pages in Vista and the program is simply put a bit counterintuitive / clunky.

Any other ideas out there?

Hey Eric, I hear your concern. There are a number of other tools, but first you would want to identify a bit more detail to find the right one for your needs.. If you want to email me ay scase20@juno.com I would be happy to share a list I have that becomes kind of a wish list of features and functions. I suspect it is not complete, but as I have shared it many have emailed me back with additions and so it is pretty good I think. I would also be happy to share which tools I know of and what they might be good for. I have heard the same thing about Outstart, and have talked to a numbr of people who have migrated off because of those issues, plus other. So what I have I will share.. hopefully it would help.. steve