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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 was watching the interview of tennis player Yanina Wickmayer where she explains why she did not fill in her whereabouts in the ADAMS computer system. As a result, she got suspended for one year.

I do not want to take any position about this decision (there are enough Facebook groups that do that), but this story reveals some typical problems that need to be addressed when introducing a new software tool:

• Communicate clearly: the “business rules” need to be communicated clearly, so that the user knows the policy and guidelines. For that, you use the proper way of communication with your users (oral, e-mail, …) Sending letters to the home address of a globetrotter does not fall under “proper way of communication”.
• Motivate: if your users know the philosophy of your application, why it makes things easier and what the benefits are, chances are much higher that the tool will be accepted.
• Make it look nice: while applications are judged by IT people on their functionalities, the end users have a lot of interest for the “look & feel” of the application. If it looks good, your application will “sell better”.
  The ADAMS application does not look very sexy at all, have a look at the brief demo.
• Leverage technology: a web application is a good choice for a global, world wide application, but “a pc connection to the internet” does not seem to be always available to the sporters. But I’m sure they all have a Blackberry. Why not make a mobile app?
• Train and document: the ADAMS application is a great example where the use of e-learning would be very appropriate: lot’s of users, spread over the entire world. Short demos, faqs, procedures…
  The only thing I could find on the net is a Captivate demo. Now, there is nothing wrong with Captivate as a tool, but providing a 30-minute animation for people who just want to hit the ball hard, is like torturing them. Why not provide brief, task based animations? After 15 minutes, the animation starts to explain how to fill in your whereabouts, and continues for at least 10 minutes…

WADA, Vlaamse Overheid, if you need any help, let me know. I see it as my contribution to Belgian top tennis.

Jane Hart keeps a list of Top Learning Tools, submitted by learning professionals from all over the world. This is my top list:

1. SharePoint: has become my platform of choice for knowledge sharing. The My Site stores all my content, shared or not shared, and makes it accessible from anywhere.

2. OneNote: because of its integration with other Microsoft Office products, I prefer OneNote over other note taking tools like Evernote.

3. Captivate: has been my favorite screencasting tool since version 1.0, because of its ease of use and flexible outputs.

4. Camtasia: my alternative for Captivate when it comes to recording complex applications that need real-time recording.

5. Jing: an ideal screencast recorder for “quickies”

6. WordPress: a versatile weblog with a great community around it

7. Delicious: has replaced my favorites and is quickly becoming my personal web memory

8. Google Reader: allows you to follow hundreds of RSS feeds, share posts, rate them…

9. TweetDeck: Twitter is great if you want to follow the “buzz” of the moment, but it would be impossible to manage the stream without an application like TweetDeck.

10. Adobe Presenter: one of the easiest PowerPoint converters with video, quizzing and SCORM support.

A lot of IT projects fail because users struggle with the change that the new tools bring them. As an IT implementer or trainer, it is good to “unlearn” everything you know about the software, and view it from a user perspective.

The video below shows that what is simple, is not always obvious!

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:
    
  • 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:
    
  • 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.