Adobe Captivate 4 Aggregator Issue

One of the nicest new features of Adobe Captivate 4 is the ability to create Aggregator Projects.  These combine existing projects along with a table of contents.  This feature encourages a better workflow:  each discrete demonstration or simulation can be created as a separate Captivate project, and the results can be rolled up and combined via an Aggregator Project.  The benefits of this approach are many:

1. I supports reusable content:  some projects can be used in more than one Aggregator Project.  You can create a global intro, for example, to add boilerplate and branding to all of your courses.  Some content is generic enough to live in more than one course, saving work and enhancing reach.
2. It supports distributed work flows:  you can divide up the list of projects between more than one Captivate user and then combine the results.
3. It provides a workable table of contents:  the way TOC was implemented in previous versions of Captivate wasn’t workable, for most people (myself included).  It was, for all practical purposes, broken.  Third party vendors sprung up to write a better version.

I’ve written previously about reporting challenges for those of us who prefer to run Captivate-created projects but don’t want to use a Learning Management System (LMS).  Captivate 4 supports email reporting, but there’s an (as yet) undocumented catch:  email reporting doesn’t work from within an Aggregator Project!

I discovered this one through trial and error.  The “send email” button that is included in your quiz once you enable email reporting is non-functional if your quiz is running from inside an aggregator.  The solution (for me, for now) was to publish the quiz project separately and add a project to my Aggregator Project (labeled “final quiz” in the TOC) containing a button that links via URL to the quiz project.

The only drag with that solution is my testing and production environments have, of course, different URLs.  And I haven’t found a way to link via a relative URL.  So I end up having to test locally and then edit and republish before transferring the files to production.  That’s pretty minor.  Still, I’ll be filing a bug on this one.