Adobe Success Story

Challenge

• Integrate video, animation, and interactivity into highly branded course content
• Reduce time to market
• Increase developer productivity

Solution

• Online training
• Database-driven content
• GTT rises above the clutter of the online training market with highly branded, rich media courses

Benefits

• Integrated rich Internet applications with full reporting capabilities
• Gained competitive advantage
• Reduced time to market
• Reduced bandwidth and lightened the server load
• Expanded access to developers

Project Details

Online training for the workforce
Global Training Technologies (GTT) is a premier developer of web-based solutions for training, corporate education, and business communications. The firm offers a full array of highly branded, interactive training courses that cover customer service, sales, human resource management, use of software applications, safety, and other issues critical to organizational success.

"As baby boomers retire in droves and companies expand operations, a huge gap is opening in the workforce," says Brian Thornton, senior software engineer at GTT. "New hires will have to be trained in a hurry and affordably." To support this demand for training, GTT developed a learning platform laden with rich media—video, animation, sound, and interactivity—communication staples of the emerging workforce.

Quick, cost-effective customization
Unlike many online training courses that simply incorporate Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, GTT delivers rich, interactive training that can easily be customized to meet any customer’s needs. The powerful combination of Adobe’s Macromedia Flex and ColdFusion® solutions allows GTT to quickly tailor and rebrand content, or customers can use the courses as they are. "With Flex, it’s the cascading style sheets that keep our workflow modular. We have a full repository of ColdFusion components, and we can execute them on demand," explains Thornton.

Using Flex, the development team can easily tailor content to any industry. For one project, the team created a custom application for the furniture industry by rebranding an existing application. "We could do the same for the medical industry or any line of business, quickly and cost-effectively," says Thornton.

GTT took advantage of several ColdFusion features to streamline integrating the firm’s dynamic course work with database content. For example, the firm can use cfgraph to easily embed charts and images into e-mail updates sent to clients. These enhanced e-mails give clients a visual overview into schedules, courses that still need to be taken, and performance on completed course work. GTT developers can also use ColdFusion to generate easy-to-read graphic documents—reports, schedules, course content, and other materials—on the fly for delivery as FlashPaper™ files or in Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF).

Half the development time
Rapid development and the modular workflow are key benefits of GTT’s success with Flex and ColdFusion. In only a few months, the firm created and deployed more than two dozen interactive courses integrated by ColdFusion into back-end MySQL databases.

Because developers can work independently on discrete pieces of the same application, teams can take advantage of existing source code and build processes.

"Using Flex, five developers can do twice as much work as ten developers coding in Java® or PHP," says Thornton. He finds the concept of reusable, extendable, prebuilt sections and layout managers on the Flex platform unbeatable for rapid development. "Plus, hiring Flex developers is very manageable because the talent pool is plentiful," he says. Traditional Java programmers find the transition to ActionScript—the Flex programming language—smooth and familiar.

Developing in ColdFusion provides GTT with a solid foundation to extend applications to support additional services, such as web and mobile services. Because ColdFusion applications support open standards, GTT can more easily work with partners and bring in new affiliates, scaling operations and creating new marketing and revenue opportunities.

Creative outreach to new markets
Companies can resell GTT products on an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) basis. "In one instance, we masked a partner’s website to look like our site, so when customers log in, they are seeing our product in our database. We did that easily in Flex, which separates the presentation tier from the back-end logic," says Thornton.

Reduced bandwidth and a lighter server load keep GTT running lean and efficiently. Overall, GTT found it easy to integrate Flex and ColdFusion servers into its existing IT structure.

Flash® Video, which helps distinguish GTT courses from the competition’s, shares a special relationship with Flex. Flex and Flash share a common component format that allows GTT developers to create highly customized components in Flash and use them in Flex applications. Flash and Flex teams work together to rapidly create assets, custom components, and skins for customized content. GTT developers then embed Macromedia Flash (SWF) files compiled in Flash into Flex applications.

To improve the quality and variety of images in courses, GTT uses Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator® software. "Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are industry standards for developing rich, compelling graphics," says Thornton. "Those tools help us convey the right look and content to our customers."

Fast delivery, outstanding interactivity
Thornton sees Flash—installed on more than 98% of computers worldwide—as the ideal way to deliver rich Internet applications across operating systems, regardless of connection type.

Flex applications handle processing best suited to run on the client, including integrated video, resulting in great user experiences for GTT customers. "Flex automatically checks users’ connection speeds and delivers content mapped specifically to their bandwidths," says Thornton.

For GTT, the move to Flex and ColdFusion has been effective. "The proof is that our courses are the best on the market," says Thornton. "End users are totally engaged with the integration of graphics, text, interactivity, and streaming video." Automated e-mails with embedded images and charts are sent to users, while compilation reports can be sent to managers.

At a recent training conference where GTT showcased its products, most of the other speakers used PowerPoint. GTT took the stage with its rich Internet applications based on Flex. "Participants came up to us after our demo asking 'how did you do that?'" says Thornton. "The short answer is 'Flex'."

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