Comments on: Articulate Presenter Review

By: Omri

Omri — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:15:14 +0000

Hey Gary,
Thanks for the reply,
Adobe Presenter does in fact look like a viable replacement.
unfortunately for me, the company we are working with on this pilot insist using articulate created materials. (corporate politics).
To tell you the truth I am just really frustrated with trying to get something working, which should just work.
Especially when it is something as trivial as recording audio.
On another desktop I have, I had a completely different issue.
another annoying issue is that it just works so slow. even on powerful machines (XP on core 2 duo 2.0ghz with 2gb Ram) – i can run a couple of virtual machines which will work just fine. but i just feel that presenter is sluggish even when running all by itself.

The FAQ and forum are really dull compared to other software related forums I have visited( at least IMHO ).

Maybe you could make a new review comparing the old version with the new version of articulate, after asking around it seems the has been a major regression in the articulate 09 suite.

I will Test adobe presenter and see if it would be even remotely possible to use it instead of articulate.

p.s it seems the link to the review mentioned in the update is dead.

Thanks again.
Omri

By: Gary Hegenbart

Gary Hegenbart — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:18:33 +0000

I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. The initial 09 version of Presenter did have some bugs, but I think most of them have been fixed in the updates. I never record audio in Presenter, or any other authoring/development tool. I always keep it separate just in case something happens and to allow me to change development tools without redoing everything.

Presenter does have competition. Adobe has a product called Presenter that does the same thing as Articulate Presenter. There are also many other PowerPoint conversion tools. For eLearning development there are many tools, Lectora and Flashform, for example.

I’ve used Articulate Presenter for a couple of years with great success. I hope your future efforts are more successful.

By: Omri

Omri — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:32:08 +0000

I am working for a training company on a trail for modifying our training material to E-Learning format.
During our pilot run articulate has caused us to loose hours and hours of recordings because of software bugs.
(These recordings were made by our professional trainers – effectively loosing almost 2 man hour days worth of work estimated at around 400$ a day)
Eventually we decided to record the narrations using a different software and import it later.
although this is a viable workaround it feels like it was missing the point of using this software.

I feel this product is completely immature and frankly i can’t understand how this software is not labeled BETA
it surely doesn’t feel ready for every day usage not to mention completely overpriced for a software that piggybacks on another product (Microsoft office).
I think the real problem is that they don’t have any real competition in their field.

By: Gary Hegenbart

Gary Hegenbart — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:27:02 +0000

Laura,
I have published to SCORM and it does work well. I’ve had some issues with progress being reset if a learner re-enters the course after completing it, but I’m not sure if that is an LMS issue, SCORM issue, or Presenter issue. I was able to work around it, though. If you want to test out your courses, try http://testtrack.scorm.com. You can upload courses and see detailed SCORM reports. It’s a great, free resource.

By the way, the SCORM JavaScript code Presenter uses was originally written by the folks at Rustici Software, so it’s rock solid and well tested.

By: laura

laura — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:18:51 +0000

I just got the answer to my question re publishing to SCORM on Articulate’s site.

But I would very much like to hear about experience launching from an LMS.

By: laura

laura — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:13:30 +0000

Hi there,
thank you for the comprehensive review!
I’d be interested to know if you tested the SCORM output and any details you can provide. Can you create a full course that can run from and report results to an LMS (SCORM version 1.2 and 1.3)?
Thank you!

By: Nidhi Gupta

Nidhi Gupta — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:17:14 +0000

why is trial version of Articulate Engage on my machine taking 100 years to save a project??

It does’nt even show whats the status

By: Tom Kuhlmann

Tom Kuhlmann — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:32:52 +0000

Great review. I completely agree about the tool not being content. We’re working with the user community to help them go beyond the bullet point look. I like to treat slide like a blank screen.

There really are a lot of great things you can do once you step away from the PowerPoint paradigm.

Love the term “shovelware.” I’d be interested in seeing what you can do with the tool to make it more than shovelware. Feel free to send me an email, we always love to do customer spotlights.