Monthly Archives: September 2009

Windows 7, Explorer view, and opening files from SharePoint with Office applications

Posted by on September 30, 2009 1 comment

I have been using Windows 7 for quite some time now, and one thing that has been bothering me is the performance (euh, lack of performance) when using the Open with Windows Explorer option in SharePoint. Opening it, using it is sooooo slow.

But recently, I read this post of Amanda Perran. The lack of performance seems to be related to a setting in Internet Explorer: under Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, you need to uncheck Automatically detect settings. This magically increases the speed of your Explorer View, but what is even better: drastically decreases the load time of Office documents when opening them from SharePoint.

So this is something every user should know. Spread the word!

Adobe Captivate and the ADL SCORM Test Suite 1.2.7

Posted by on September 17, 2009 3 comments

Today, I have been struggeling with a SCORM 1.2 conformance test of an Adobe Captivate package. Let me share my experience to avoid that others have the same painful experience.

The mission

The purpose is to test an Adobe Captivate 4 SCORM package (SCORM 1.2) with the ADL Test Suite 1.2.7, and prove it is fully SCORM compliant.

The issues

When you load the scorm package in the ADL Test Suite and you run the Content Package Conformance Test, there are two issues:

  1. the metadata test passes successfully, but when you need to launch the SCO, the Captivate content does not load. IE shows a script error:
    Error: ‘document.getElementById(…)’ is null or not an object
  2. if you get the first issue fixed, the SCO launches but test fails with at least one of the following messages:
     ERROR:   LMS Not initialized
     ERROR:   SCO invoked API calls out of order
     ERROR:   LMS not initialized
     ERROR:   Invalid LMSFinish() call
     ERROR:   SCO invoked API calls out of order

The solutions

It took me quite some surfing to find the following solutions:

  • The ADL 1.2.7 test suite software is already quite old, and a lot of forum posts suggested that you needed to use the correct Java RTE, older browsers… I tried all that, but it never helped me. I now have the test suite running on a Windows 7 64 bit (!) , with the latest Java RTE (Version 6 update 15, build 1.6.0_15-b03), and IE 8. So don’t spend your time on this.
  • And now for fix number one: to make sure that your SCO gets launched in the test suite, you need to edit the html file that is generated by Captivate when publishing your content (the .html that has the same name as your project .swf). Open the file with a text editor (Notepad), on the second line you will find <!– saved from url=(0013)about:internet –>. Delete that line.
    Restart your test, and your SCO will now launch. But you will get errors in your test now.
  • Fix number two: change the security settings of the Flash player on your machine.
    • Get some Flash content playing in your browser. Any Flash animation will do. Go e.g. to www.adobe.com.
    • Right-click on the animation, you will get the Flash context menu. Select Settings.
    • You will get a little menu like this:
      flash settings
    • Click the Advanced button. This will bring you to an Adobe Web site.
    • In the table of contents on the left, click Global Security Settings Panel. This will show you a panel like this:
      trusted locations
    • Add the location where your ADL TestSuite software is installed to the trusted locations. The location of the TEST SUITE software, not the location of your zip file or your content files. Those get copied automatically to a TestSuite subfolder when you run the test.
    • Close all your browser windows and re-run the test.

Explanation and credits

There is probably a very good explanation why you need to do all this, but I am not able to give it to you. I’m just summarizing some steps I found in various forum posts. So kudos go to these forum members:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/212606

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/440917

Bottom line?

A lot of forum posters are yelling that Captivate content does not pass the SCORM test. Before I ran my package through the Test Suite, I tried importing it in three different LMS’s, and it worked in all three! So failing the ADL Test has more to do with the way the Test Suite runs local content than with Captivate content not being SCORM compliant.

Interface language in Adobe Presenter projects

Posted by on September 10, 2009 No comments

In one of our recent projects, we used Adobe Presenter to create some course material and quizzes based on PowerPoint slides. This actually works very well, but one thing bothered me: the “interface” of the course or quiz is sometimes shown in a different language. We are talking about these texts:

presenter1

presenter2

 I was wondering how you could “force” it to be in one language, and what was the logic behind it. This is what I found out:

  • the language you get in the interface is based on the Regional Settings of the pc you display the content on. So NOT on the language settings of your browser (which seems more logical to me). This is an issue in Belgium as we have French (Belgium) and Dutch (Belgium), and not every computer is configured correctly.
  • the text is only modified if your regional settings are set to one of these languages: German, French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, or Dutch. In all other cases, English is shown.
  • you can customize this text by creating a custom theme with the Theme Editor for your project. Consult the Adobe Presenter help pages for the correct procedure.

And this last topic gives you a possible solution for a “fixed” language: if you set the labels for all languages to the same language, you have your uni-lingual interface. That’s a lot of copy-pasting, but it works!