With Macromedia Captivate, you can create interactive tutorials with recorded narration, built-in testing, with an easy, painless, and quick process. But now that authors can so easily create tutorials, they have time to think about the best way to deliver their content to end users, and to think about what works well with the Captivate workflow.

When I started using Macromedia Captivate early last year, I quickly learned that Captivate authors did not have a clear deployment path for Captivate content they wanted to make available on the web. This problem does not stem from Captivate— the tool has a plethora of publishing options. Captivate can publish to SWF file format, optionally wrapped in HTML, to Macromedia Breeze, a stand-alone executable with an auto-run option for CD-ROM delivery, e-mail, Microsoft Word, and you can even send your content to a server through FTP functionality from within Captivate. While heavily testing Captivate for my own use and collaborating with others in the Captivate community, I quickly found many Captivate authors that are experienced, organized, and extremely talented in delivering documentation, tutorials, and other various e-learning content.

To support effective and easy-to-use delivery of Captivate content on the web, I developed a utility, called CaptivatePlayer. In this article, you will learn how to deploy Captivate content with CaptivatePlayer.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Macromedia Captivate

Macromedia Flash Player

• Download Flash Player

Tutorials and sample files:

• captivateplayer.zip (ZIP, 1.2 MB)

Prerequisite knowledge:

• You should know how to use Macromedia Captivate at a beginner level.
• You should be able to edit XML files with a text editor, have a basic understanding of editing HTML, and be able to move files around in folders.
• If you are looking to deploy your content quickly, go to the “How to Use the Play List XML File” section.
• If you are a web developer looking to integrate and customize the CaptivatePlayer into your site, go to the “How to use the index.html file” section.