ARTICULATE :: The Comparative Analysis

As per Prof. Mark Schwartz's suggestion to [rightly] establish a new thread for comparative products. Here it is.

Firstly, let me say, I'm a big Articulate advocate. We've been using Presenter since v.4 and have a (small) library of AP09 licences. The main reason I've asked about other products (in particular iSpring) is less about changing, but more about satisfying myself that sticking with Articulate for a further development cycle (now in our 3rd three year stint) is the right, qualified decision. Yes, this is freebie consulting 101! We've invested heavily in Articulate as the core of our business and I do not take lightly the decision to change platforms.

So, I'll drop my pants (a little) so that you can see and understand why I'm interested.

Originally, we chose Articulate over all other comers and wannabe's as it did what it said: converted robustly maintaining the vast majority of PPT formats and, importantly to us, spat it out so that each slide was an individual swf. It did this (and continues to do this) extremely well.Other huge sells were the ability to embed video on slide (and now in side panel as well) and the awesome compression that makes delivering it alongside streaming a breeze...anyone see that pun?

As an aside, have just built a beefed up a new encoding machine (AMD Phenom II X6 - yes, 6 cores - 16gb of 1666 RAM, SSD for OS - W7 64bit - and 2x 500gb 10k HDs). You should see this thing chew through presentations and video encoding.

Might I also add that <b>Articulate's customer/product support as well as these forums are second to none</b>. The support was an equal key factor in the original purchase decision and would make it hard to move away.

Let me now explain why we've stuck with Articulate and why, from time to time, we raise our periscope.

I suspect we use Articulate in a very different way to the majority of you out there. We record, convert and host conference content completely synchronised to PPT. We wanted a tool that would allow us to work with an SDK (even when there wasn't one...) to allow us to interact with the AS components. So, rather than having to record tracks slide to slide and worry about synchronisation, our system basically does it on the fly so that the PPT remains separate from the cue points which remains separate from the video or audio that is captured...separately.

As you can appreciate, in a conference environment we do not have the luxury of time, especially where you have 4-6 presenters per session (at least four sessions per day) with less than 60 seconds between them. Multiply this by (our biggest event) recording up to 16 rooms simultaneously per day for five days are outputting somewhere in the order of 600 Articulated streaming presentations (of which about 20% have embedded videos, 20% of those more than five and not unusually more than one video per slide)...most mounted by the end of the following session. Yeah baby.

Here are a couple of examples of the output (not from the above as it is medical). They are built to launch to "Chromeless" frames but that code sits at the conference site or goes to the client.

• http://www.ircast.com.au/conferences/online/acc10/presentations/1215/player.html - This one has various additional videos (side panel mounted). It is a complex PPT but synchronisation is complete throughout the presentation (including intra-slide animations: it's a real hallmark). Articulate handles the complex graphics beautifully.
• http://www.ircast.com.au/conferences/online/srr11/presentations/1323/player.html - Presenter is pretty average. But this was heavily edited at the front end (due to the presenter) but maintains synch spot on, particularly as the embedded fly-through video runs on slide 4.
• http://www.ircast.com.au/conferences/online/acc10/presentations/1210/player.html -This one is audio only unsynchronised.

The video that you see (or audio that you hear) in the top left is streaming in, totally separate to the Artic package. Actually it is cleverer than that: it can (now) easily switch between streaming, progressive or local video or audio which can be either synch'd or unsynch'd. We added the progressive and local play so that (eventually) we could offer it to LMS providers who I understand need to have the option of content that can be locally (intranet) contained with there learning content. Anyhoo, I digress.

We capture our cue points directly out of PPT with a clever add-in we wrote. A single configuration file then brings the bits together. We also configured the AS call outs so that the stream integrates with the native Articulate controls. If you clicked forward on the slide index, you'll see that the video moves to where it should. Needless to say over about seven years we've invested heavily in Articulate as the cornerstone of our process.

As you can imagine from the above conference example, we needed to further streamline the process. We set base templates from the Articulate masters so that these convert to exactly the same format and minimise the requirement of human intervention (necessitated so that every name, title, organisation, slide advancement, launch procedure etc) was not left to a a team of individuals who could inadvertently change a template or mistype data. So we feed it all in automatically. Basic, per licence conversion, mounted to our servers, clever scripts manipulate and inject and Bingo, back-end Articulate batching.

So, here is why we occasionally look around.

When we do an event (particularly of this scale) we need this raft of Articulate licences, install them onto other people's machines or hire in a whole bunch (it cost a fortune to schlep this amount of equipment around) then uninstall on the way out. We need to train operators at every event. Coupled with the issue of the local drive conversion requirement, it is very difficult to manage who and where hundreds of presentations are being converted and generated. So having a server-based conversion engine would be killer. I asked about <b>iSpring</b> in particular as it can convert to a set of individual swfs plus it has a server conversion engine option. Someone in the Storyline thread mentioned another app of which I hadn't heard that also had a server-side engine. If we could batch the front end conversion process it would be awesome.

One of the other issues is based on the fact that we build nothing (presentation-wise) and are only converting other people's work. We've worked around most issues. But the one that remains is page layout. Does anyone know of a converter that will scale the slides without screwing up the formatting too much. Much of the stuff we convert comes in as A4 and it takes us ages to reset the pages, drop font sizes, scale pics etc before we can convert. Ironically, we get the least issues in going from 16:9 back to 4:3. I may be naive and disrespectful to the Gods of vectors and shapes or something but it would seriously make my life easier if Articulate could convert and scale from any presentation page layout.

Additionally, we've been <b>desperate</b> (really) to get to AS3 so that we can update our swf player so that we can upgrade our streaming servers so that we can improve our service and reporting! A separate conversion engine would solve this as we'd just need to build a new wrapper to house the other components.

We are (I am) talking to some of the clever Articulate developers out there already and I suspect that we'll get to where we need to be soon.

So, really more interested in hearing about the shortcomings of competitors because I don't really think that there is anything out there as good overall as Articulate but if it highlights some missing attributes that might make it onto the development list then this could only be good for us all, right?

Cheers

Rob

p.s. sorry about the length.