Touring the homepage

- It's time now to take a more in-depth tour of the user interface when logged in as a user as well as an administrator. We'll begin with an administrator. I'm going to type in my User ID for an administrator and my password. Alright, once logged in as an administrator you're going to notice things that the average user will not see on their homepage. First of all, on the left-hand side are Administration tools.

We can collapse this list by clicking the arrow and expand it when we need it. As administrators you have access to the organizational settings, you'll be able to monitor your disk usage, every account comes with a certain amount of space and there are things we can adjust in here, and we will a little later on in this course. Here's where we go to Manage Users, that means adding new users, editing user information, even deleting users when they're no longer needed or part of the organization.

Managing skins can be done if you're going to be working with Flash video in your titles, and we can send out emails to the entire organization from here using the Send Organization Email link. We'll get to all of that a little bit later on. Across the top of your screen you're going to see tabs, Getting Started should be selected by default, and down below is what we see for Getting Started. For example, creating new titles, here's where we go to create new blank titles. There are some options for getting head starts using a wizard, using themes, etcetera, we'll talk about that in the next chapter.

We can import Lectora titles and all that means is if you've been using Lectora on a standalone computer you can get access to those titles, bring them into Lectora Online using this import option. And if you have PowerPoint presentations you've been using, you can bring them into Lectora Online to get a nice head start when creating new titles as well. Once you start creating those titles you'll see a list of your most recent ones here and Lectora Online does come with one sample title.

It's a great way to get back to the titles you've been working on quickly without going through the Open process. You can go right to this list, give them a click and open them up right where you left off. Browse All is what you would use to go to titles you don't see on this list. Now if we scroll down a little bit towards the bottom of this screen here in the Getting Started section, you'll see a number of learning resources as well. Of course this lynda.com course is going to help get you Up and Running with Lectora Online, but there are additional video tutorials, there's a Click and Learn section, something called Lectora University, a separate site.

There are sample titles you can access. It's a great way to get a good head start and see how some of the features are used in Lectora Online. A community forum, the elearning community is huge and the community forum is a great place to meet up with other people and discuss issues and procedures, etcetera. And there is an Information Center down here as well. Latest News is the section where you're going to see some of the latest news from Trivantis regarding Lectora Online, and over here you can see Tasks and Administration.

This is a little bit different than what we were talking about over here in the top left-hand corner under Administration tools. Here's where you go to manage your titles, for example. So if you have several titles and maybe there are titles that no longer need to be stored, taking up space, they can be removed from here, they can be edited from here, we can export titles from here, so if we wanted to share that way we can export our online titles to be used in a standalone environment. There are title reports that we can run from here as well and you can see we can organize our media as well.

So if you're using, for example images, maybe you're using video and audio, all of your media can be organized for the organization, and it can be shared, that's the nice feature. There's also Contact Support available to us down at the bottom. Let's scroll back up towards the top. Next you'll see an Assignments tab, give that a click. Later on we'll talk about assigning tasks to people in the organization. It's a great way to collaborate with others. Maybe there are several people working on the same title, the same project.

Well certain people in that group may be responsible for certain parts of the assignment. We can create new assignments from here and run assignment reports, we'll get into that later on as well. Let's go to Notifications now. From here you can see we can be notified for things like when title content is modified, so if we have a title that's being shared amongst other people in the organization, we can be informed the moment something's changed, title content when it's modified is one thing, title settings is another thing.

When the settings get modified we can be informed through a notification. By default the last one is checked off and that's title assignments modified. So assignments related to a title when it's created or modified, those can be automatically triggered to send us notifications as well. And we can override some of these for existing titles. We'll talk about this later when we get into Notifications. And lastly at the top is People, and you're going to see a list of people.

In this case you can see, aside from me there's one other user in my organization. Let's go back to Getting Started. Next we'll log out by going to the drop-down in the top right-hand corner and choose Log Out. When we log in as a regular user, I'm going to do that, the User that was created earlier, and click Log In, we already know regular users won't see the Administration tools available to administrators on the left-hand side of the screen but notice as we move across the top for example, we see Assignments, Notifications, the same screen, People, in this case because I'm logged in as the other user all this person sees is me, the Administrator.

There are things we can do here too like send messages to people and chat with them as well. Let's click the Getting Started tab and scroll down towards the bottom. You'll see all of the same options for creating titles, opening recent ones from the Recent list, the Learning Resources and News, and you'll notice that when we get down to Tasks and Administration even though we're logged in as a user, these same things appear. For example, if I wanted to manage titles I could go to the Manage Titles button, it's going to open up a separate dialog, and here's where we can do things like organize with folders, open up existing titles, rename, delete, share, we can add notes, there's an Import button here as well, and over here on the right-hand side when we select titles you can see there are things we can do with team members and users, all things we will get to once we start creating some titles.

But let's click the Close button and return to our home screen. Now that's a quick tour of the user interface for users who are logging in to Lectora Online. Once you start creating titles there's a whole separate user interface. You'll be opening up the Publisher window when it's time to work on titles and we'll talk about that user interface when we get there.