This cost our company a small fortune

[mikeshiflett]

Hi Gabe and everyone on the forum. I have a company called MS Aviation and we've used articulate presenter for about 3 years now. Our courses contain around 50 individual presentations done in articulate and are started by a separate user interface so we can make them choices in a menu. We publish them on DVD-rom and have the user install the application on their PC.

We currently have about 1000 customers. We must now send a new DVD-rom to every one of them. At about 10.00 a piece including shipping we just lost 10,000.00

I can believe that Articulate, a company who's whole business is Flash didn't see this coming.

I really like the products you make, but there is a fix for all of this but so far you haven't implemented it. I don't understand why presenter can't publish to a single swf file rather then the directory structure it has. All of our other authoring tools can publish to a swf and they all were not affected by flash 10.

Because we imbed custom flash animations into our presentations we can't let these files go as they are because anyone can just go into the directory and take out our custom swf files. We have to bail these files into a single exe file to protect our swfs which is why the fix you have will work but we'll have to rebail and republish everything we have. This is around 200 presentations over 5 courses.

I don't know if it's possible for you to publish to a single swf, as there may be technical reasons that you don't do it. But it would have saved us a lot of money and make publishing so much better for us.

I'm glad to see in your last statements on the sticky that you are in contact with adobe about this and it's not going to be an ongoing problem.

I'm such a fan of your products and have referred so many to you that it was a real disapointment to see this happen. I know you have a great technical staff and will work it out, but multipy the losses of those of us who really use articualte to the max and it's caused a lot of income loss.

- Mike Shiflett
MS Aviation
Private Pilot DVD Course, FAA Test Prep and Private Pilot Training DVDs

[johneastman]

I echo this message. There is a real cost issue in cash terms to send updates to all our customers but also a credibility issue in terms of customer confidence and loyalty that may not be measureable at this point but may come to bite us all in the coming months.

I am also now nervous and would like some clarification from Articulate, as I see there is yet another version of the Flash 10 fixer that now purports to fix an issue with the player.html file and IE 8. Does this mean that my customers that start to use IE8 will find their presentations no longer work? Will I have to send out yet another batch of CDs to all my customers? Will Articulate tell their customers about this issue directly rather than just waiting until IE 8 starts to be in common use and all our presentations stop working again?

Can we have some straight answers please.

[gabe]

Hi Mike & John- Thanks for taking the time to share your concerns. We're really sorry and know what a significant impact this issue is having on so many people. We're doing our best to help resolve the issue. Unfortunately, content on CD is the hardest part of this to address. Although it does require some effort on the part of your customers, here's a way to allow your users to switch between Flash Player 10 and Flash Player 9 to view your existing content.

If it's any consolation, Articulate customers are not the only group impacted by Flash 10. Companies like the BBC, Iomega, and CNN were all impacted, too (see here and here).

IE8: Presentations will work just fine in IE8. The deal with that is that as long as we were releasing a new version of the updater, we had our our entire engineering staff go through our entire codebase line by line to make sure Presenter 4 & 5 will be future-proof with future browsers and Flash players. We've invested a lot of time and money with Flash and browser vendors in an effort to future-proof our products.

Even though IE8 is in early beta and hasn't yet been released, presentations will currently work just fine in IE8. Depending on how Microsoft finalizes the implementation of IE8, though, there may be an issue with embedding in-slide Web Objects.

So we figured that since you'll be running our Flash Updater anyway, we thought we'd be proactive with regard to IE8, so regardless of how Microsoft decides to update it, you'll have no problem with embedded Web Objects -- if you use that feature in your courses.

By the way, the fact that our content does not exist as a single SWF is unrelated to this issue. In fact, the reason we create output the way we do is to optimize playback for users and to improve load times, especially for web-based content. Let's say you have a 100 MB course. If that existed in a single SWF file, your users would have to wait for the entire course to load before they could view it. With our output structure, users can begin viewing as soon as the first slide loads, and subsequent slides will preload.

[mikeshiflett]

Gabe:

Thanks for the long answer and especially the reason why you don't publish to a single swf file. We are working with our customers now on making the necessary changes. I'm also glad to hear that you are working with Adobe about future stuff.

- Mike Shiflett
MS Aviation

[gabe]

Sure thing, Mike. Glad to hear my response was helpful. Best of luck in working on the solution, and let us know what else we can do to help.

[Max Trescott]

Ditto everything Mike Shiflett said and more. He and I are in the same business, selling aviation training materials. I'm happy for your many customers that can quickly fix their online presentations, but for those of us who sell CDs to thousands of customers, this is a nightmare.

To say I'm none too pleased about this is a gross understatement. The cost to recover from this comes directly out of our bottom line as there's no reasonable way that we can ask our customers and distributors to bear some of the cost. Just replacing existing inventory--ours and our distributors--will cost thousands. And that doesn't include the cost of replacing disks for customers who suddenly discover that their CD which has been working fine for 2 years suddenly stopped. I'm already getting the calls. This is a huge productivity hit in time dealing with this problem that could have been spent on new revenue generating activities.

Yes, I've signed the petition to get Adobe to make changes on their end, but I'm not optimistic that any change could come in time to spare me any expense. Adobe is 15 minutes from me and they prioritize these things like other large high tech companies for whom I've worked. If it's not directly impacting their immediate sales, it's going to be a fairly low priority.

To your credit, you've communicated a nice workaround that some of my customers are already satisfied with. But many barely know how to operate a computer (I know, hard to believe but there are a lot of 50 year old pilots that have spent all of their time in airplanes and not in front of computers), and they have no interest in downloading a new browser.

Also, you have a top notch support staff who've never failed me when I've called for help. You definitely deserve the 2008 Best Web Support Sites award.

But please understand, I feel that Articulate has let me down big time on this one. And I'm the one stuck with a large, unexpected cost that I feel like I shouldn't have to be paying.
Max Trescott
Glass Cockpit Publishing

[gabe]

Hi Max-

Welcome to the forums and thank you for taking the time to share your frustration. Thank you, too, for the kind words about our support, in light of the situation.

As you've probably read in this thread and others, I know this is a huge deal for a number of our customers, and I wish there was more we could do. Unfortunately, content on CD is the worst hit.

I'm glad you've signed the petition and that some of the work-arounds are viable for some of your customers.

I hope we won't let you down again, and we can assure you that this particular issue won't happen again.