Solved - SWF Showing Up in Legacy Captivate Projects Converted to Responsive

I was helping a client with publishing an older legacy course that was originally developed when SWF publishing was still common. She was taking the project and converting it to responsive and attempting to publish it. She was ending up with errors related to the course containing SWF. Yeah, that’s right - SWF in a responsive design course! That shouldn’t even be possible.

I brought the engineers at Adobe into the conversation to help with this issue. I first discovered that if I didn’t convert to responsive first but merely ran the HTML5 tracker and removed any SWF resources I was able to publish to HTML5 without any SWF files. The Adobe team had me try repeating this process and only then convert it to responsive. This worked!

It seems that Adobe Captivate “remembers” the SWF configuration of these legacy older courses when it publishes, even if you publish as a responsive course. In the case of my client, it looked like the legacy course was originally published as a hybrid course that contained both HTML5 and SWF. Ultimately this wouldn’t work for her situation because her LMS was rejecting any SWF content.

If you’re getting similar problems in your race to get legacy content published without SWF and with responsive design, here’s the workaround in detail.

Open your legacy course that was originally published for SWF. Click on the Project dropdown menu and select HTML5 Tracker as shown below.

Once you launch the HTML5 Tracker you click on each item that has been identified as incompatible with HTML5 output. This will take you to that slide and select the object in question. In some cases, you can simply delete the object. If the content is crucial to the learning you can delete it and substitute it with something similar but compatible with HTML5. In this example, I have a slide transition that isn’t compatible with HTML5, some animated text on my slide title and a series of animated SWF arrows. I’m simply going to replace the animated text with a regular caption, remove the slide transition and replace the animated arrows with arrow shapes.

Once I have finished removing SWF related content from the course I need to publish before converting to responsive. Again this step is crucial in making sure that Captivate doesn’t keep the SWF in its “memory“ when I publish it as responsive later.

Some people get confused by the selection of HTML5 and SWF. Make sure that HTML5 looks darker and SWF looks lighter. It almost doesn’t matter what else you select just make sure you publish it once with only the HTML5 option selected.

Once you have successfully published it as an HTML5 project you can save your project as responsive using the File dropdown menu and selecting Save As Responsive.

You will likely see a warning message that Captivate will upgrade your project to the latest version of Adobe Captivate. Obviously, agree to this to proceed, but it’s a best practice to save it as a new project name so you can retain the original file just in case something goes wrong.

Once you have finished saving the new responsive version of your course, make whatever changes you need to the layout to support responsive design playback on multiple devices, i.e. add fluid boxes and drop your onscreen elements into those fluid boxes, so your course adjusts its appearance for those different size screens. When ready, you can then use the responsive design publishing method and be assured that SWF isn’t selected (even behind the scenes).

Convert Flash Courses to HTML5 Without the Source Files

In this video tutorial, I show you a tool that Adobe Captivate users already have that can convert older eLearning courses to HTML5, even when you don't have the source files. Thanks to Cathy Moore for permission to use her and Kinection's elearning course designed and developed for the US Army. Read her blog post to learn about the activity and how she created this complex branching scenario.

👨‍💻 https://blog.cathy-moore.com/2010/05/elearning-example-branching-scenario/

Publishing for Your LMS - Monday, February 3, 10:00 EST | 15:00 UTC

In this Livestream, I will review all the options that you should be using and the ones you should avoid when publishing your Adobe Captivate eLearning course.

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.