Publishing to Email

One of the several output options that Articulate Presenter gives you is the ability to publish to email. Let’s take a closer look at what this means and when you should use this publish option.

First, it’s important to understand when you should email a presentation and when you should post to a Web site. Simply put, email should be for sharing your presentation with an individual or small group (five or fewer recipients is a good rule of thumb). Perhaps you want to share your work-in-progress before you’re ready to deploy.

If you’re sharing your presentation with a larger audience or have finalized your content, then you’ll want to Publish to Web and upload to your server. Then you’ll have a permanent Web address (URL) that you can send to an audience of any size via email, or link to from your existing Web site or Intranet site. This has a number of advantages, including the following:

• You won’t clog up your email system. Email is best for communicating via text and small attachments. In fact, you or your recipients may not be able to handle attachments larger than a certain file size.
• You can control the content in a single source. If you use email to distribute your content, imagine having to send around a large file every time you update it. This uses time and resources each time (bandwidth, unzipping by each recipient, etc.). If your presentation is on a Web server, you update it in one place and notify your audience of the update. Your content is always just a click away.

That said, if publishing to email is the best approach for your particular goal, read on…

To email your presentation to an individual or small group, do the following:

1. Go to Articulate -> Publish.
2. Select Email -> Next.
3. Decide whether you want to email your Flash Presentation, your Project Files (PowerPoint and audio files), your PowerPoint file only, or a Word storyboard or presenter notes (all but the Word options will first be zipped, then attached to a new email message).
4. Enter your recipients and message into the new email that is opened.
5. Send!

It’s important to remind your recipients of the following: Double-clicking on the zip file, then double-clicking on index.html will not launch your presentation. That’s because most newer zip programs allow you to see inside a zip without actually extracting it. Make sure your recipients fully extract the zip file before trying to launch your presentation.

Note: You must use Outlook as your default mail client to use the Publish to Email feature.