Happy Last Year of SWF (Actually Probably Even Less Time)
Over five years ago, I was asked by my employer to make versions of my Adobe Captivate courses to be made available to non-employees such as volunteers and contractors. The problem was that non-employees, due to policy, did not have access to the organization's learning management system. At the time, I published all my eLearning courses using SWF technology, and while there was the availability to publish for HTML5, I didn't do it. I learned that while SWF based courses were okay for our LMS, the IT department had a policy not to allow Flash-based material to reside on their web servers. I had to publish these courses for HTML5. It was clear that the end of posting my Adobe Captivate projects as SWF was in sight.
Adobe will end support of Flash Player on December 31st, 2020. That said, each browser maker will be taking (or already has taken) steps to disable and eventually prevent Flash Player from being installed. When learners go to launch your eLearning courses, they will begin to see different results. In the case of Firefox, today, I get a black screen and a warning that my connection to the site isn't secure. With Chrome, I get a small puzzle piece icon with the message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked. On Microsoft Edge, I get a message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked, but I'm able to enable it to continue to the content. Lastly, with Internet Explorer 11, it runs without incident.
Google's blog mentions that it will entirely remove Flash Player from Chromium-based browsers by the end of 2020. With the announcement that Microsoft is migrating its Edge browser to Chromium technology, that means Edge will also not be able to run Flash content either. So, what do you do?
Well, If you haven't already started a plan to migrate your Flash-based eLearning content, you need to start right now. A year sounds like a long time, but depending on how much material you have still running on Flash Player, a year may not be very long. Look at the content you have that is presently Flash-based and consider these three scenarios.
It’s an older course but nobody takes it anymore
Sometimes an old course may be on your LMS that is only there for record-keeping purposes. For example, the LMS course exists to maintain the transcript that Robert from the accounting department took that Microsoft Excel 2003 course a decade ago. In this case, I would say that there is nothing for you to do. Nobody in your organization should be enrolling and launching an Excel 2003 eLearning course today in 2020.
It’s a currently used course and you have the project file
Good news. Adobe has built a great tool into Captivate that will help you migrate your content from SWF based to HTML5. It's called the HTML5 Tracker. To access the tool...
Click on the Project drop-down menu
Click the HTML5 Tracker option, which will open a small window that will list all the items in your eLearning project that are not compatible with publishing to HTML5.
One by one, click on each item listed in the Unsupported Slide/Object column. When you do click on an unsupported object or slide, it will instantly jump to the slide and select the object in question.
Decide what to do with that object. You can choose to delete the object or replace it with something compatible with HTML5 publishing.
For the example course, I used for the screenshots above; the items in question were animated arrows that I used for emphasis. I merely replaced them with smart shape arrows with a motion path to create attention. I was able to republish the course within minutes to be fully compatible with current and future web browsers.
It’s a currently used course but you don’t have the project file
Perhaps you purchased this course pre-published or perhaps you hired a contractor to build the course for you from scratch. Perhaps the former L&D department in your organization wasn’t very good at holding on to source files. In any case, compile a list of these courses and thus begins the year-long project of recreating these courses from scratch. The good news is that your LMS has published versions of these courses for your developers to review. If you have lots of these courses and little time to redevelop them, rebuilding these courses could mean capturing a series of image captures. If you have less of these types of courses to rebuild, it might mean a full development workflow. Much of this will depend on how much regular work you have to complete in 2020 in addition to the migration project. If your in-house staff are not up to the task or don't have enough bandwidth to take on such a project, you can hire an external agency to assist with this project. For recommendations, feel free to reach out to me, and I can either consult with you on smaller projects or bring on additional resources to get the bigger jobs done before it's too late. Use the CONTACT PAUL link on the upper right-hand corner of the page and we can schedule a brief call to discuss your needs.
