We are considering purchasing Captivate for our training department but are concerned about security (we are a financial institution). Can anyone summarize how Captivate files are saved and then accessed by users? Is everything saved on your work computers/network?

Thank you for your help.

Scott

As with any development tool, the resulting files are just files. When I used captivate, we saved the files as Flash files (I can't remember if it does that by default or if I had to convert).

How you deploy them across the company is a question for your IT department/ system administrator.

I agree with above comment. Understand that if your training is on Intranet under your company firewall, you really dont care what tool is producing what type of files.

If you are affraid of coping your files within different divisions captivate produces swf files so no worries there!

Regarding Flash, it is safe and protects your content.

In addition, you can ask your IT people to set up different access levels.

Scott,

There are some security issues to consider. For example, you may want to choose the E-mail Tracking output option in Captivate. This option provides you with the ability to generate an email with the results from a Captivate file with quizzing components. For example, you may want the email to generate the time, score, location (where the student left off), status (complete, passed or failed), etc.

In a secure environment where the IT department will often limit the ability of users to change browser security settings or install plug-ins, a Captivate developer may find certain options unavailable, unless he or she can work with the IT folks to allow them to happen. The following is from the Adobe Captivate Developer Center: "For the e-mail to be generated properly, the Captivate (SWF) file must communicate with the JavaScript in the HTML file that is generated at publishing-time. This means you must create and launch the HTML file, not the SWF file directly. If security settings on the browser are set too high, JavaScript will not be enabled, the communication will not occur, and the e-mail will not be generated."

At a minimum, you will need to check with your IT department on browser security settings and user privedges (e.g., for downloading the Flash player). IMHO, it's always a good idea for eLearning developers to have a healthy working relationship with IT folks.

Marty Bartreau