If you're planning to be in Orlando next week -- the event runs Monday and Tuesday, February 26-27, 2007 -- make sure to stop by the Articulate Booth #315 and say hi to Mark and Don. They'll take good care of you and will tell you all about our awesome suite of products, including the exciting new Articulate Online.
And if you haven't yet registered for the event or happen to live in the Orlando area, you can get into the expo free of charge by registering for the event here and inputting VIP code TEXP2.
Articulate Online could well be of interest to small-to-medium and larger companies looking for a user-friendly way to facilitate the easy sharing and tracking of their e-learning content. With a tight integration with Articulate's PowerPoint presentation, quiz and survey making tools Articulate Online is well placed to cater to the needs of corporate training departments in a variety of settings.
...
Articulate Online does a good job of managing and reporting on your content, and this is its main strength. By updating Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker so that either will quickly publish content to your Articulate Online account, you have an easy way to get up and running.
...
It is a simple prospect to publish pre-existing content, make it easy to share and access over the Internet and provide incredibly detailed reports on how this content was used and responded to. In spite of the possible complexity of these reports, however, Articulate has done an excellent good job of making the entire interface intuitive and very easy to use. I had no difficulty in understanding the detailed reports produced by Articulate Online, and found the minimalistic layout and design to be intuitive and easy to grasp.
...
Furthermore, Articulate Online offers a rich variety of features while keeping the service highly customizable. Various access permissions can be assigned to individual users, content can be branded with your company logo, and data can be easily imported and exported for passing on to clients and colleagues.
Michael even created a YouTube remix of one of our AO tutorial videos:
What's especially cool about this award (and the last one from E-Learning! Magazine) is that it's chosen by the people who actually use our software -- you, the e-learning designers, managers, trainers, and subject matter experts of the world -- and not by a small panel of industry experts who might not use our tools on a daily basis. Now that's pretty cool.
"We wanted these awards to have a lot of credibility, and not just represent the opinions of a handful of people," said Steve Wexler, the Guild's director of research and emerging technologies. "More than 4,600 eLearning Guild members have told us which tools they use and have told us what they think of these tools and the awards were based on the opinions of these e-Learning professionals -- professionals that are passionate about e-Learning."
Congrats yet again to the Articulate team, and thank you to our thousands of worldwide customers who have selected us for this newest honor!
Oh yeah, and if you haven't already seen our latest offering, which will allow you to host, manage, and track the results of all that great e-learning content you're creating with Studio Pro and Presenter, be sure to take a look at Articulate Online. With 1-click publishing from Presenter and Quizmaker, and the best usage reports you'll see anywhere, it's already changing the way people manage and deploy e-learning programs.
I'm as exhausted as the rest of the Articulate team that's been working around the clock preparing for this launch, but I couldn't be happier to have the honor of announcing that the long-awaited Articulate Online is now live!
As of today, expensive and complicated Learning Management Systems are a thing of the past.
There's a powerful new solution on the market, which gives you one-click publishing from your Articulate authoring tools directly to a hosted solution where you can easily share and manage your content and track your users' results on everything from the number of slides viewed in an e-learning course to details on how your users answered your survey or quiz questions.
I'm obviously biased, but this is one very exciting product. I've been blown away myself from the moment I saw an early release, and I'm delighted that we can finally share it with the world.
When we first showed a demo to our beta testers, one remarked: "I was figuring good stuff but as good as this, it's a dream come true. Everyone should see the demo. Don't make us wait, where do I start?"
Once you start publishing your own content to Articulate Online, you'll be able to share your content with private and public users in no time, run powerful reports, and more. My bet is that you'll wonder how you ever managed your e-learning program without it.
A big congrats to our rockin' development team, and to everyone else here who helped bring this product to market.
And finally, thank you goes out to our 300+ beta testers who had a direct impact on the success of this product launch.
Whenever I feature content that includes animated characters, people always say, "Wow! How'd they do that?!"
In a high-tech kind of way, animated characters help to bring your presentations to life. Plus, it's always fun to hear a computerized voice reading your words.
There are a number of character animation vendors in the marketplace, but many I've come across require you to subscribe to a hosted service that streams the characters from the vendor's server into your content, and you pay residuals for as long as you want to use the characters.
What makes Media Semantics stand out is that you pay a one-time fee for their Character Builder product, and you own the .SWF character output -- no recurring fees, no lifetime residuals.
And guess what? You can bring into your Articulate Presenter content any .SWF characters you create with Character Builder -- simply go to Articulate -> Insert Flash Movie. Your animated guide will play just like any other Flash movie.
"Our Character Builder product lets you easily create Flash .SWF files with cartoon or realistic characters that speak and gesture, given a simple transcript," said Doug Copeland, president of Media Semantics. "I've just tested the Character Builder with Articulate's Insert Flash animation feature, and I'm pleased to report that the integration works VERY well."
"The Best of Elearning! Awards are unlike any hosted in this market," said Catherine Upton, Publisher of Elearning! Magazine. "Every brand and product was reader-nominated and the winners are the leading vote earners from each product category."
Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio also received an honorable mention in the Best Authoring Tool category, so to some degree, we actually competed against ourselves in that category -- and still managed to win.
"Articulate has proven to be an indispensable rapid e-learning partner," according to Mark Hamilton, Director of eLearning Strategy & Development for Reuters, one of the world's largest news and information companies.
Since Reuters is constantly pressured to deliver information in faster and easier ways, Mark's list of technical requirements for a tool to help him reach these goals was tough:
Rapid authoring of new content
Easily customize courses and presentations
Create short, targeted, easy-to-navigate, searchable courses and presentations
"My team uses Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio Pro and Articulate Knowledge Portal to develop and host e-learning courses and presentations to help clients maximize the capabilities that our products offer," Mark said.
Check out this presentation to hear Mark tell the story in his own words:
Enjoy, and a big Happy New Year to all of you! It's going to be another very exciting year for Articulate.
Just a few short months after the forums went live, four dedicated individuals quickly stood out, helping to make the community a valuable resource, and the Articulate MVP Program was born.
In recognition of his outstanding contributions both to the community as a whole and to Articulate beta programs, I'm pleased to announce our newest Articulate MVP: Rob47.
Rob has really shone in recent months, supporting fellow community members and providing excellent feedback to us during beta testing of new products.
Congratulations, Rob, and thank you for being such a force in the Articulate community!
The ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) is one of the oldest (1944) and largest (70,000) training organizations in the world. To earn an award from such a prestigious group is a pretty cool honor.
Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio Pro received a top prize for Learning Technology at the first annual American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) Atlanta Technology-Based Learning (T-BL) Special Interest Group (SIG) awards event. The award, in the tools category, was judged by the ASTD T-BL SIG leadership team on the overall strength of the entry as it relates to technology innovation and meeting business needs.
Kineo's newsletter went out last week, and with it was a great review of Engage, which includes a few sample interactions the consultancy created to highlight what you can do in just minutes with the tool.
"Engage is incredibly easy to use. We would challenge anyone not to be able to produce a nice learning interaction in 30 minutes."
Word of Mouth is the 
| Comments (0)
From the folks at Robin Good's Media Network -- who once called Articulate Presenter "the Ferrari of rich-media Web presentation tools" -- comes a new review of Articulate Online (which happens to be the featured review on the site today):
It's been exactly a month since I announced our last award (Best of 2006 E-Learning Awards), and today it's time to announce yet another industry recognition: We've won both the Platinum and Gold awards in two of four categories in the eLearning Guild Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS) Member's Choice Awards. 
