Adobe Presenter upgrades and Death of Flash

[futurepresenterhelp]

I have several Adobe Presenter lectures and presentations that I need to edit and update. Can you provide instructions on what I will need to purchase to ensure that the program I use will work after Flash goes away? Related questions: 1) I have v.11. Has Adobe Presenter been upgraded (or will it be upgraded) to be able to play without Flash? 2) Do I need to purchase some other software to update my Adobe Presenter presentations, e.g. Adobe Captivate? 3) Should I assume that I will need to rerecord all my presentations in some other software? Thank you!

[Peru Bob]

I've moved this from the poorly named Community Help forum (which is the forum for issues using the forums) to the Get Started forum so that proper help can be offered.

[Nancy OShea]

Adobe Presenter 11.1 is $14.99/month.  Transform your Powerpoint 2016 slides and HD videos into interactive e-learning courses.  Output to HTML5 for viewing on desktops and mobile devices.

https://www.adobe.com/products/presenter.html

[futurepresenterhelp1]

Thank you, Nancy,

I have followed your message and I upgraded to Adobe Presenter 11.1

However, now when I go to "publish" my PowerPoint, I receive this message: "You will need to upgrade Adobe Flash Player before using this option". When I click on okay in order to upgrade, I am taken to https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-issues-windows-10-ie.html 

which indicates that I already have Flash on the test and states "Flash Player is integrated with Internet Explorer in Windows 10.  You do not need to install Flash Player."

Can you please provide me instructions to get this working?

Thank you in advance!

[futurepresenterhelp1]

Update: I was able to get to publish by downloading enable controls zip for Flash: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Registry-keys-to-reenable-7cd9f723

[RodWard]

I think you are going to find this is only a temporary reprieve because 2020 has long been slated as the cut off point for support of any Flash-based content in web browsers.  Most of the browser manufacturers have been warning that they are about to turn off all support for playing Flash content.  January 1 (i.e. tomorrow) has sometimes been stated as the date the curtain finally comes down.

I don't currently have Presenter on my system.  Is there no other publishing option except SWF available there?  Is there no HTML5 output option?

[Nancy OShea]

For all intents & purposes, Flash is already dead. 

See if this helps

https://helpx.adobe.com/presenter/using/publishing-viewing-presentations.html#PublishasHTML5outputnb...

Publishing to PDF might be another option.

https://helpx.adobe.com/presenter/using/publishing-viewing-presentations.html#publish_a_presentation...

[RodWard]

The second link shown above by Nancy indicates that you can publish to HTML5.  That's the way I would be going if you need continued animation or interactivity. 

As far as I know PDF only supports multimedia e-learning content if the Flash Player Plugin is installed in the end user's Acrobat Reader app, and that's increasingly unlikely to be the case anymore.  If your PPT content is just static 'page-turner slides' you might be able to get away with PDF.

[futurepresenterhelp1]

Thank you for your suggestions. I seem to be able to publish using the HTML5 option using Nancy's instructions link. However, I am now not able to then view the presentation. Here is what I have tried:

I published it without success to:

1. My organization’s Connect server using my account – the Adobe Presenter logo simply continues to be 4 squares twinkle without opening.
2. Adobe Activate Prime – and 6 hours later it is still saying: “new version of content Pres is being uploaded to Prime”. I tried IE, Chrome and Firefox (Firefox did not work at all).
3. PDF – and the file is there however I can’t get it to open or play (I have animations, so I agree Rod, doubt this would be a solution).
4. My computer – I belive I tried all functions, e.g. zipped, only HTML5, “both” SWF and HTML – and just got the twinkling logo without opening. I tried changing my default browser and opening in IE, Chrome and Firefox, with no difference.

• I also tried to get the zip file working through my Yuja account – I’m not able to get it working in that platform. Perhaps I don’t know how to do that.
• I have tried to unzip the zip file and click on index.htm and  API.HTML and nothing happens. Is that the correct file to launch the presentation, or is there another?
• When I try to play the Scorm files in my third part learning management system, D2L, it says “The package is missing a manifest”
• By the way, to test whether it was a problem with the PowerPoint file, I developed a plain pptx file and recorded my voice to two slides, no animations or slide transitions, very simple. I tried to publish to my computer and still got the twinkling 4 squares – did not play/open.

I have 50-60 old Adobe Presenter presentations I need to convert to HTML so my university can view them this year. Any ideas, instructions or solutions would be dearly appreciated.

[RodWard]

HTML5 content should ideally be uploaded to a web server and played from there in a web browser.  With Captivate HTML5 content, the web servers need to be able to serve JSON files in order for the content to play.  That may also prove to be the case with Presenter (I don't know).  If so, and your web servers or LMS servers are not set up to allow JSON, then that might account for your not seeing content playing.

If the content is zipped, and you want any hope of playing it locally, you will have to extract the zip archive completely to a folder on your local hard drive before trying to execute the main HTM or HTML file that will then display the content.  (You cannot get the content to work just by double-clicking the zip file and then trying to double click the HTM/HTML file from within Winzip. )  And even then, again, if the content depends on JSON, it needs a web server environment in order to play.

If you upload a zipped HTML5 course to a SCORM-compliant LMS, the zip file will need to be a valid SCORM package otherwise the package will be rejected as invalid.  Captivate has options to configure the necessary settings when publishing for SCORM.  The marketing blurb for Presenter claims that it can integrate with SCORM LMSs but there didn't appear to be a lot of details in the HELP files I looked at about how to do this.  You found that the LMS rejected your package due to it not complying with the SCORM standard.  There was no manifest in the package.  So, on this basis, you don't appear to have configured it correctly, but I cannot tell you how to do it.

I appreciate that you have a dilemma here, with dozens of presentations to output, but since I don't have Presenter on my system, and this is actually the Adobe Captivate forum, not the Presenter forum, there's not much more I can offer.  The Presenter forum seems to have disappeared now with the recent move to a new forum software for Adobe products.

If you still have the original PPT decks used to create these Presenter modules, I would suggest you download the current Trial version of Adobe Captivate and try importing a PPT deck into that to see if the results would satisfy your needs.  If you don't like Adobe Captivate, try Articulate Storyline.  It also imports PPT to create elearning packages.

Either way though, you are going to need to learn a lot more about how to create e-learning.  I recommend you get some basic training in whichever technology you go with.

Perhaps someone else on this Captivate forum will still be using Presenter and can give you more assistance.

[futurepresenterhelp1]

Is Adobe Presenter dying?

Is anyone at Adobe working on the upgrade past V11.1?

[Lilybiri]

Have no idea, don't have Presenter myself neither. It is meaningful however that a Presenter forum is no longer available in the forums list. 

All features of Presenter Video Xpress are now available in Captivate Video Demo.

[Nancy OShea]

I moved this post to Captivate because Presenter is part of the e-learning community and not the Creative Cloud community.