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Recently, I had to produce screencasts that needed to be published/played in a Microsoft Silverlight player. I know, most people are still using the very popular Flash format, but sometimes there are reasons why you need to use Silverlight. For instance because it needs to be published on a Microsoft platform. ;–)

The trouble is that this requires your movies to be in .wmv format. Captivate currently ony produces Flash output (of course).

If you are starting from scratch, you can use a screencasting tool that produces .wmv files directly. You can use Camtasia Studio, or Microsofts Expression Encoder 3. This will give you a nice .wmv file that you can then embed in your authoring tool, or play directly with a Silverlight player (e.g. the free one on Codeplex.).

But what if you have tons of Captivate movies ready to be published? Or if you like Captivate better than Camtasia? Well, no worries, you can follow these steps:

1. Remove the “interactive” elements from your Captivate movies. This includes buttons, playback controls, question slides, anything a user can click on. This is important, otherwise your conversion will fail.
2. Publish your project  and get the .swf file.
3. Convert the .swf file to .wmv. I used Camtasia to do that (via Import media you can import an .swf file, and publish your project as .wmv), but I heard of other people using tools like Prism to do this.
4. Integrate the .wmv in your Silverlight authoring tool or in your player.
5. Done!

You can view an example of the final result. Requires the Silverlight Player (duh!).

Any tips or tricks? Share them in the comments!

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!

Microsoft introduces the Microsoft Live Services plugin for Moodle. This extension for the popular Learning Management System Moodle adds two major functions to the LMS:

• authentication in Moodle via Windows Live ID
• a Windows Live Services block in Moodle that allows students to access their Windows Live Services (mail, messenger…)

This extension could allow a school or institution to use Microsoft’s Live@Edu offering, together with a full blown LMS like Moodle.

More info in this video (Silverlight required):

Microsoft is offering 3 free e-learning “clinics” about the upcoming Windows 7. So if you do not have time to find out every new feature by yourself, have a look at the modules.

You get free access for one year. Access to the site is usually rather slow, but still acceptable. And a tip for the Internet Explorer 8 users: make sure you activate Compatibility View for the site, otherwise content is not displayed properly on a lot of interactive pages!

The links:

• What’s New in Windows 7 for Consumers
• What’s New in Windows 7 for IT Professionals
• What’s New in Windows 7 for Information Workers

On several occasions, I had trouble connecting my pc to public hotspots. You know the drill: set up a wireless connection to the hotel wifi network, surf to any site and it should bring you to a page where you need to pay to much money

Only, on my pc it did not do that. It would try to load the page forever.

But finally, I found the solution. If you have VMware on your pc, or any other software that adds “virtual” network adapters: go to Network Neighborhood and disable all network adapters except the one you use to connect to the hotel network. Magic, it works!