This article is part of a larger series that reviews the new tracking options available in Macromedia Captivate. To be more specific, most tracking options aren't exactly new, but the mechanism—or the code behind the tracking options—is new and the functionality has improved.

In this article I focus on the e-mail tracking mechanism and discuss what you need to know for Captivate to generate an e-mail with the results from a Captivate file with quizzing components. This article is written for all types of users. It provides an overview for new users as well as an entry point for any user looking for specific e-mail information and integration issues with Captivate. Read more about these topics in the Adobe Captivate Developer Center, E-Learning topic center, and in the following articles:

• Output Options in Captivate—Part 1: An Overview of Tracking Options
• Output Options in Captivate—Part 2: AICC Tracking
• Output Options in Captivate—Part 3: SCORM Tracking
• Exploring Quizzing in Macromedia Captivate by Mark Fletcher
• Storing Captivate Test Scores in a Database and Exporting Them to Excel with ColdFusion by Tim Mushen
• Using Captivate Simulations in QuestionMark Perception Assessments by Peter Pundans

To understand some of the terminology in this document better and view links to other informative sites, you may want to visit the Macromedia eLearning site.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Captivate (or Captivate-published files)

• Try
• Buy

Flash Player (version 6 or later)

• Download Flash Player

Additional software may be used or required, if you are publishing for AICC, SCORM, Authorware, QuestionMark, or e-mail

Tutorials and sample files:

• captivate_e-mail_output.zip (ZIP, 3 MB)

Using the Sample Files

Sample files are available for each of the tracking mechanisms available in Captivate. The sample files provide you with both source and packaged files for each option. You can view the source to see how the project was created, as well as see what is published or distributed for each of the tracking mechanisms. Because the provided content has already been tested in each of the tracking environments, you can test the existing content in your environment(s), before comparing the results of creating and publishing your own Captivate content.

The sample content available with this article is specific to the e-mail tracking mechanism. See all parts: Output Options in Captivate—Part 1: An Overview of Tracking Options, Output Options in Captivate—Part 2: AICC Tracking, and Output Options in Captivate—Part 3: SCORM Tracking in this series to understand and download other tracking mechanism sample files. To use the content, download the sample content from the links above. Extract the contents into a working directory. Additional information can be found in ReadMe.txt documents in the extracted files.

Packaged

This folder contains the packaged files (from the source folder) for e-mail tracking. It is recommended that you host and test these files on a web server for deployment (though you can test from a local directory by double-clicking the HTML file to launch and test e-mail tracking on your local machine).

Source

Contains the source files of Captivate content that is created for e-mail-tracking. This gives you an idea of what the source files look like. Please review the packaged folder, so that you'll know what packaged files you need to deploy to generate an e-mail successfully from Captivate.

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