How to publish a Captivate project to a SharePoint site

Microsoft SharePoint is an interesting platform if you quickly want to publish your e-learning content. These are the steps to publish an Adobe Captivate project to a SharePoint site:

1. Publish your Captivate project as Flash(SWF), and make sure that you have the option Export to html checked. This will produce a set of files: a .html file, a .swf file and a .js file.

2. Upload these files into a document library on a SharePoint site. You can start your project by clicking on the .html file.
If you are running SharePoint 2010 and the file does not open, you might need to change a security setting in SharePoint. Also, SharePoint has a default file size limit of 50 MB. Your system administrator can increase this limit.

3. Optional, but recommended: to make it easier for your users to start your course, you can include a link to the .html file on the home page of your site.

 

Microsoft OneNote available for iPad

Last week, Microsoft released the OneNote app for iPad in the app store. It is the first version of the app, and still lacks some functionality I would like to see added, but it is a great first step. These are the things you should know:

  • the app is free, but is limited to 500 notes; if you want more, you can unlock this limitation with an 11,99 EUR in-app purchase. I consider myself a heavy OneNote user, and I am currently at 320 pages. So with some management, you can stay under the limit.
  • Notes are synced with Windows Live Skydrive, so you will need a Windows Live ID to use the app. Advantage is that you have an online backup of your notes, and you can even edit them on Skydrive in the web app.
  • If you use formatting extensively in OneNote, you will be disapponted that a lot of these features are not supported in the iPad app. You get plain text. There is some room for improvement here.
  • Written notes (ink on a tablet pc) are not visible in the iPad app. Sometimes the app crashes on pages that contain a lot of written notes.

There is also an iPhone version of the application. And if you are thinking about converting your entire Evernote archive to OneNote, my colleague Frank pointed us to a conversion tool. Although you might want to wait with that until the 2.0 version of the OneNote app is released…

 

Sharing a OneNote notebook: always a good idea!

For a lot of people, Microsoft OneNote is the electronic alternative of their
“little black book” that they take to meetings, to write down their action items
and notes. But it is much more than that. One of my favorite features is the
sharing of notebooks. This allows you to store your notebook on
a central location (e.g. a SharePoint site, a file share, or even on Windows
Live Skydrive), and use it with multiple people. Why would you and your
colleague carry your own little black book if you are working on the same
project?

Even if you do not want to share your notes, it is still a good idea to store
your notebook on SharePoint or Skydrive. If you put it on a location where only
you have access, this will create the perfect backup of your
notes, because your notebooks will automatically synchronise between your pc and
the shared location. You don’t want to lose your little black book, do you?

The video below shows you how to setup a shared notebook. Tip: maximize the
video and watch in HD for a better viewing experience.

My top 10 tools for Learning 2011

Like every year, Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is inviting learning professionals to list their top 10 learning tools. These are mine for this year:

  • Twitter: the best way to generate your own “information streams” about various subjects
  • SharePoint 2010: Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration platform. Fan of the “My Sites”, that allow you to create your own “portfolio”
  • Adobe Captivate: by far the best e-learning development tool of the moment. Looking forward to the future HTML output
  • Diigo: social bookmarking tool that replaced my delicious account
  • Tweetdeck: invaluable for organizing my twitter stream. Like the fact that it is cross-platform
  • Google Reader: allows me to follow more than 400 websites or other information sources (RSS) in one single web-based application
  • Feeddler Pro: iPad app that connects to your Google Reader account and displays your RSS feeds on iPad
  • Microsoft OneNote: the best note-taking application on the Windows platform. Unbeatable in combination with SharePoint and a tablet pc. If only they would release the iPad app in Europe…
  • Office 365: brings the power of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Lync to your home network
  • WordPress: one of the most user friendly blogging platforms

Password expiration in Office 365

I have been a very happy Office 365 user since day 1, but yesterday suddenly my e-mail stopped working. And it was only when I tried to log on using OWA that I discovered that my password expired and that I needed to enter a new one. It seems that by default your password expires after 90 days.

As I do not want to reconfigure all the devices that use my 365 account every 90 days, I decided to disable password expiration. The only way to do this is via a PowerShell command, explained in every detail in this blog post.

Security is a good thing, but it would have been nice to get a little reminder e-mail that your password is about to expire. I am on the P1 plan, which is the “dummy” plan for individuals and small businesses; if I need to change a setting, I want to do this via the portal, not via PowerShell.