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A
Anonymous
August 16, 2011
Answered

How to restrict access with Usernames and Passwords?

  • August 16, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 1278 views

I'm an Intern at a manufacturing company that hired me to make a set of tutorials using Captivate.  The goal is to have a handful of employee's (scattered across the globe) to be able to go onto the company website and take the tutorials & quizzes I'm making.  I've played around with the advanced variables options a bit to get a feel for them but I'm not finding what I need.  The employee's that the company selects to take these e-courses should be able to login with a username and password to a page that has the courses listed on there.

Should I get our server/website maintainers to just code this, or is it easier (and would it make more sense) to make a Captivate presentation that references a list of specific company email address' and from their allows only those email address to have a username and password created to it.  From this point, after the user logs in, they see hyperlinks to the ecourses they must take.

Any input on this would be very helpful and thanks in advance!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Erik Lord

    Ok I think I'm beginning to understand this better.  So an LMS is too complicated or too expensive to have our IT guys code, I'm assuming.  What ever the case may be, free would be the best option because there is only a handful of people who will have access to these captivate modules.  It wouldn't make sense to drop a large sum of money just to add some security on behalf of so few individuals.

    I should explain we would need to report scores and have them stored somewhere, so as you were saying, this means an LMS is the only way to go.

    The company I work for doesn't maintain their website, we have another company that maintains our entire online presence.  I met with with them last week and they need to know what sort of things they'll need to get these Captivate files onto our site.  As I understand so far, I should tell them to look into an LMS with low cost that supports username & password management that reports the score grades to somewhere, correct?  Does every LMS allow custom ways to report and store/send the scores?  Does anyone have any example of what reporting to an LMS may look like in the presentation?

    I have this example I found online of how scores are reported to acrobat.com: http://www.jameslockman.com/captivate/Quiz_Acrobat_dot_com_data_collection.htm


    Pretty close...

    And LMS isn't the ONLY way to track scores and such information, it's just the most common these days.

    Captivate does allow alternatives, like to an acrobat.com account as you point out, or you can create a custom reporting page:

    http://help.adobe.com/en_US/captivate/cp/using/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d119e958285f-8000.html#WS365a66ad37c9f510-67fa130d1265cad66a2-7fff

    However, those methods do not provide for any up-front security.

    If your IT folks are willing to setup a password-protected folder on your webserver, and you setup your Captivate lessons to report to the acrobat.com account or a custom reporting page, you could possibly achieve what you need fairly easily (low-cost!). However, that approach may not allow for tracking individuals specifically. If you have just one site with one generic login (i.e. user:password), that just lets anyone in with that user/pass. If you want each user to have their own username and password, that gets a lot more complex. Can your IT guys setup such a login page that syncs with a centralized user database (i.e. Active Directory)?

    Then how do you track that user through Captivate so the lesson results are recorded for the related user on your custom tracking page?

    It starts to get complicated, thus an LMS may be easier:

    Moodle is a very popular, free LMS.

    http://moodle.org

    Installation may be a trick internally (find a server, find folks to install), but there are folks out there who offer to host it for you.

    Here are others:

    http://www.openelms.org/

    http://sakaiproject.org/

    There are also a variety of commercial LMS products out there, costs vary widely.

    Here's the one we use: http://www.inquisiqR3.com (pricing link is on that page)

    Otherwise, here's a good reference list where you can choose a variety of criteria to filter on.

    http://www.capterra.com/learning-management-system-software

    Hope that helps!
    Erik

    2 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    August 16, 2011

    bump

    Erik Lord
    Erik Lord
    Inspiring
    August 16, 2011

    If you don't care about any reporting on who accessed the training, how well they did, where they exited, etc...then there's no need for an LMS.

    If you want any sort of report on how the user's performed, accessed, etc...then an LMS would be a great idea.

    As Lilybiri said, Moodle is a free LMS and there are many others out there. One I like is Inquisiq R3.... But whatever LMS you may think is useful, there's costs involved one way or another.

    IF you don't care at all about tracking and such then, yes, get your IT folks to code you a simple login page to get access to a webpage behind it where you can list links to all the Captivate projects. How you or they do that is entirely up to you and totally outside the scope of Captivate's functionality, and there are plenty of ways to do it (HTA, .Net, ASP, PHP, etc) - ask your IT folks...

    Erik

    A
    Anonymous
    August 16, 2011

    Ok I think I'm beginning to understand this better.  So an LMS is too complicated or too expensive to have our IT guys code, I'm assuming.  What ever the case may be, free would be the best option because there is only a handful of people who will have access to these captivate modules.  It wouldn't make sense to drop a large sum of money just to add some security on behalf of so few individuals.

    I should explain we would need to report scores and have them stored somewhere, so as you were saying, this means an LMS is the only way to go.

    The company I work for doesn't maintain their website, we have another company that maintains our entire online presence.  I met with with them last week and they need to know what sort of things they'll need to get these Captivate files onto our site.  As I understand so far, I should tell them to look into an LMS with low cost that supports username & password management that reports the score grades to somewhere, correct?  Does every LMS allow custom ways to report and store/send the scores?  Does anyone have any example of what reporting to an LMS may look like in the presentation?

    I have this example I found online of how scores are reported to acrobat.com: http://www.jameslockman.com/captivate/Quiz_Acrobat_dot_com_data_collection.htm

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    August 16, 2011

    Hello and welcome to the forum,

    The functionality you are looking for is normally something provided by a LMS, not something to be easily, if ever possible, done by Captivate, sorry,

    Lilybiri

    A
    Anonymous
    August 16, 2011

    What exactly is an LMS?

    Does any of this have to do with the Aggregate?

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    August 16, 2011

    Not at all. Learning Management System is what is normally managing users, passwords, courses, scores etc. Examples are BlackBoard, SumTotal, Moodle. They work together with Captivate, that is able to produce SCORM-compliant courses.

    Captivate has some alternatives in case you do not have a LMS, like reporting to acrobat.com or an internal server. But if you really need username-password access to check a LMS is the way to go. Moodle is free.

    Lilybiri

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