What is Captivate?

Hi there and welcome to our community

Expounding on what Rod offered.

Suppose you work in a call center and answer questions about how to use software. Maybe you have a guy named Bob that calls you every Monday morning because Bob always forgets how to insert a Table in Microsoft Word. Hey, stuff like this really does go on! (I used to work in a call center and one employee would always play Tetris between calls and when she got stuck with an issue she couldn't answer, she would always come ask me how to solve the call.)

Using Adobe Captivate, you can open Microsoft Word and use Adobe Captivate to record the series of steps you always tell Bob how to do. You then create a Flash output of that Captivate recording and copy it to a server. Then when Bob needs to be refreshed again on how to insert the table, he can click a link and watch the process unfold right in front of him.

Rod talked about eLearning. If you aren't currently a Captivate user and aren't sure what it does, I think it's likely you may be confused what eLearning even is. Basically, it's any type of learning one uses the computer to achieve. Anything from how to use computer applications to something sort of nebulous called "soft skills". Soft skills would be something like "Handling Difficult Customers" that a Sales trainer might teach the salespeople.

You ask about Framemaker. Basically, what Framemaker does is allow you to manipulate extremely large document sets. Perhaps the complete assembly instructions for an automobile or an airplane. You then take that huge database of textual and graphic images and create a printed document or PDF from it. These documents may have many thousands of pages. Based on what you posted, I really cannot fathom how Framemaker would help you in any way.

I tend to agree with Rod in that the eLearning Suite would seem more applicable than the Tech Comm Suite. However, I'll also add that I personally would find RoboHelp (also part of the Tech Comm Suite) to maybe help you with easily organizing and presenting the content. But that would only help if you aren't hosting your content within a Learning Management System (LMS) where you are able to track scores and stuff like that.

Cheers... Rick

Just putting on my sunglasses here so I won't be overwhelmed by the color and boldness of your original post.

Yes Captivate is an excellent tool for creating online training, and it is particularly good at creating interactive quiz questions for assessment components of training.

Captivate is an application for developing elearning.  The Adobe Technical Communication Suite does include Captivate as one of its applications, however, this collection is more oriented to developers that would be working on software online help systems and want to include the occasional Captivate simulation as part of the content.  Framemaker is an application mainly used to create online help systems and documentation products. Not elearning.

If you would mainly be creating elearning and want a suite of products designed first and foremost for elearning, then I would suggest you investigate the Adobe e-Learning Suite 2.5.  This also includes Adobe Captivate 5.5 but all of the other applications in the suite are potentially used when creating e-learning (Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Audition, etc).  That would be a better investment than the Adobe Technical Communication Suite (for my money).

Also consider that you can just purchase Captivate 5.5 on its own if you have limited funds.