Adobe Captivate 7, eLS future, subscriptions…
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Captivate 7 was released, with a little…smattering fanfare a couple days ago. There’s a pretty good notice on the official Adobe Captivate blog which details the features, and it seems like a pretty great update…but there’s no mention at all of the new release on Adobe’s home page which is kinda…lame. Sure, the Creative Cloud push is apparently Adobe’s top priority, but not even a sub-category box to herald this update?
Which somewhat leads to a common issue with Adobe’s site overall – there’s no up-front mention of their eLearning products at all. Even things which could apply, like ‘Students’ or ‘Educational institutions’ are all not-eLearning and have to do with other software packages and/or general licensing.
Maybe its just been temporarily pushed aside by all the CC-oriented material… Currently, the only way to find out about Captivate, Presenter, or the eLearning Suite is to search for the specific term, or click a tiny ‘See All Products‘ link then review a huge list…
At any rate, Captivate 7 looks good, and its still available as a ‘traditional’ version – where you download the installer and its actually installed on your machine without any ‘cloud’ or ‘subscription’ connection.
The full version pricing is $899.
Upgrade pricing is $359, which is a fair deal, but only applies if you have a standalone (not eLS) license for CP6.
Or you can do the subscription model for $20/month (with the 1 year plan).
Some thoughts on all that:
1. The subscription model would seem best. Assuming you want to keep up with the latest version, and assuming the next version of CP (8) would come out in 2 years at most, that’s $480 total. That’s more than the upgrade pricing but does allow the intermittent updates that ‘traditional’ licenses will not (for right or wrong) have access to.
And if you consider the product cycles are generally 18 months, not 24, it’s the same price as the upgrade cost ($360).
2. However, the subscription approach very well may overwrite your previous version of Captivate with the new one…so when CP8 is released, once you approve the upgrade, no more CP7? If everyone is on the same plan/version, that’s likely not a problem. If not, it could be. We have multiple versions of CP installed for various clients and testing. It’s such a part of our process, we’re wary of this ‘one single version only’ approach.
*NOTE: Per Dr. Allen’s reply below, previous versions should not be overwritten by the upgrade, so that’s great news.
3. With many of the eLearning Suite (eLS) products now a part of the Creative Cloud, it seem there will be no more eLearning Suite updates. That’s not confirmed, as far as I know, but seems likely. So those with eLS 6 licenses, and not CP6 licenses, are not able to get any upgrade pricing. Phooey.
And while eLS 6.1 is still being sold, it doesn’t seem its being sold with a subscription option.
*NOTE: Per Dr. Allen’s reply below, there’s news on the eLS front coming soon! We’ll post here when that’s provided. Fingers crossed!
So we’ll likely license one traditional CP7 version to have installed ‘in perpetuity’ and a CP7 subscription for the rest of our development team to allow access to the latest updates and improvements.
Of course, then we’ll see what happens with the Creative Cloud overall and the integration (?) of Captivate… Maybe there will be an eLS subset subscription? That could be the best solution…