Publishing your project

You've previewed your project, fixed up any issues, maybe repeated that process more than once. Also, we've gone through our Publish settings knowing that we're ready to publish. It's time to take our KinetEco New Hire Orientation project and publish it. If you've skipped to this movie you can get caught up by opening KEOrientation 0703. We got to the file menu and before we click Publish, there are some other settings you should know about that are somewhat important. Let's go to Publish settings. We have already been here in the previous movie.

We are actually going to go to another section under project like information, for example, this is where we will see what information could be stored with our project. You may have heard the term metadata if you've been following along. This is the information that our users won't necessarily see but is stored with our project. This can be important if we're going to publishing to an LMS. Author name for example, you could type in your own name here. The company, ConnectEco if we wanted to. We could add an email or simply take it out.

The company website could be included with the project. Copyright information can be attached. I'm just going to put in the year. Also the project name could be altered from here. Notice the underscores et cetera based on our project. We could take those out and leave real spaces, capitalize things. You have full control over that. And then in the description field we could add more descriptive words that could be used as we do searches in an LMS. For example, trying to find a project. The more keywords we have added here, the easier and faster we'll find what we're looking for.

For the sake of time I'll just leave that blank and skip to the Flash size and Quality settings. From here, you can see you have options to compress full motion recording SWF files. That will reduce your file size if that's important. We also have down below some presets using the slider. The highest quality, you can see our BMP rate's going to be high at 24 bits, audio 96, you can see JPEGs are at a 100%. And then we also have something called Advance Project Compression and Compress SWF Files are collected. If we go down to medium, things adjust.

We go to a lower BMP rate at 8 bits. Same thing for audio, JPEGs are at 80%, that'll save some room. And then the other two options are still checked off. The lowest quality brings our JPGs down to 50%. And you can see the other settings as well. If you want full control, though, just go down to Custom. We can choose to Retain the Slide Quality Settings. Every slide has its own quality set. You can see in the background here, the first slide in our project is optimized. But if we want to override those, we can.

For example, the BMP rate could be low, so we'll adjust it that way. Audio, you can see there's a Settings button if you want to adjust that. JPGs at 80, I'm thinking maybe, they should be higher, 100. And maybe we don't need advanced project compression, we're not concerned about file size. If you want to though, use that, and the overall project size that we publish is going to be much smaller. Same thing if we compress our SWF files. We can click OK to save those.

And now we're ready to publish. Let's go up to File, and click Publish. Now, from here down the left hand side we have number of different options at the top is our Flash format and our m-learning format HTML5. Well, so have a Adobe Connect, we can publish to a media type file, we could send our project by email. Upload it to an FTP site or get a print version of this. Lets go back to the top. This is the standard format.

Since the beginning, Flash, but we also have HTML5 down here, as well. We could publish to both formats at the same time or just one or the other. We're going to leave it at just Flash, and we'll talk about HTML 5 in an upcoming movie. Notice the name of the project, the title is the same as the name of the project in the background, KEOrientation0703. We can publish it to a specific location in its own folder. Let's go to our desktop, so it's easy to find. Later on we can test this out.

So, we'll go to the Desktop, click Choose and make sure Publish to Folder is checked off. That way, a folder will be created using the Project title as its name and we'll find all of our published files in that folder instead of scattered across the desktop. Down below, some output options include zip files, if you wanted to include zip files, it's easier that way. They're smaller files all compressed together into one where you can send it off, maybe by email for example. We could get a PDF version if we wanted to, so something to look at in print.

We could also make sure it's publish to Full Screen. So even though our format may not take up the entire screen, it will be viewed that way. We could also Generate an Autorun for CD. If we plan on copying this to a CD and handing it out, generating an Autorun for CD means when our users pop it in their drive, it'll automatically launch. If you're not doing that it's not necessary. And we can choose the Flash Player version we want to be compatible with. If we go to 11, our users have to have Flash Player 11. So, by going to the lowest option, 10, we'll reach the biggest audience.

There's our project information. And access to preferences if we want to change any of that. And some advanced options down below that are by default unchecked. So lets click Publish. This is going to generate your slides and in the end we'll end up with a folder on our desktop containing all of our published files, we are going to go there to access our project and see how it turned out. So, at the end of the publishing process, a little dialogue, it will pop up. To view that generated PDF file, we add it, we have to had Adobe Reader, it has to be version 9 or later, and, there it is.

The publish was completed successfully. Do we want to view our output? We could view it right from here, but let's choose No, which returns us to our project. And now we'll just go up to the Minimize button and get to our Desktop. There's the folder that was created, KEOrientation0703. Double-clicking it will open it up in Finder. And there's the different files. The Cascading style sheet. The HTML file that will open up in a default web browser. Also down below, the Flash file is going to play. There's the PDF file, if we wanted to look at it.

So lots of different files included. All we need to do is double-click the HTM file and that will launch our default browser and bring the project up. There we go. So we can start making selections. (SOUND) We could go directly to the quiz, start going through the questions in the quiz. You got the idea. Let's close up our Browser window and return to Captivate.

On a note about expiry dates, if you want to set one, all you have to do is go back to File > Publish Settings and under Project there's another option that allows you to do that. It's the Start and End section with Auto Play, any Preloaders that you might have, IT can provide you with a Preloader. Something that needs to take place before the project can launch. We can Password Protect. And there it is. Project Expiry Date. I can't change mine with the free trial. But you can adjust turn on, turn off, expiring dates so it never expires, for example, and you won't have to worry about that.

You can also have Fading in on the First and Last slides. I think we should on the Last slide. At the end of the project, you can see the action is to stop. We could have it loop back to the beginning or do one of these other things I think just simply stopping and fading out is good. We'll click OK, save our changes and that's how we publish to the Flash format.