Using Flare output for Training Courses

[owilkes]

Hi All,

I'm intending to convert the training courses of my company (currently in PPT) into text and images within Flare topics (which also contain text and images from User Guides etc).

Obviously, we will then need to be able to extract the information again, and recreate the Training courses. They would prefer to just keep their ppts, and be entirely separate from the other knowledge information the company holds. But that is not sustainable.

I was wondering if anyone else out there has had experience of creating Training courses out of Flare output.

Obviously, we can't create PPTs as an output format - so what do people use?

Also, the content is updated by more than just Training - so they can't just save and publish ppt images.

Any recommendations for what has worked for people in the past?

Many thanks

[DocuWil]

Hi, I am also busy creating a Training at this moment with Flare and Capture.
I just create it as a WebHelp. Of course I have made different styling.
The advantage I like is that it is easy to jump back to subjects using the TOC.
You can also create a good handout using a PDF target
The disadvantage against PP is that you need a little bit more time.

But ..... I have to extend my experience.

[SteveS]

I had a lot of success creating training sessions using Mimic.

We had a client/ server application but because Mimic is screenshot based and uses hotspots to link to the next image we couls run training on any computer prior to rollout.

Support material for the training sessions came from the program documentation (in Flare) using conditional tags and a training TOC to create the training manual.

You could create a webhelp for training that only contains images and use hotspots to link images, similar to Mimic. It would only be point and click, you couldn't mimc (bad pun) keyboard input. You could also format the webhelp pages with images and text, similar to PowerPoint, but would rely on clicking a link to move to the next 'slide'.

You might want to try something like Jing to create a movie (not interactive or 'controlable') to move the training presentation away from death by PowerPoint...

HTH