Lately at work we’ve had some “issues” trying to figure the best way to get content from the hands of content developers (the people who write the tech manuals) to instructional specialists (the people who develop training or other courses) to the Flash programmers and Graphic Designers who are developing multimedia training pieces as the final product.
Currently, there are no existing tools (that I’m aware of) that allow you to “storyboard” content to hand over to a Flash (or Director or Authorware) programmer and have them be able to recognize what interactions need to take place and what content needs to go where.
Depending the size of the course we’re developing, this can go from being a minor inconvenience to a show-stopper. There needs to be a way for the content to be organized and easily retrievable, but at the same time easy to input and provide some way of previewing what the final output might look like so the instructional specialists can get a better idea of what they’re working on.
We’ve developed a tool in Microsoft Access which does basically what we need, but leaves much to be desired due to the inherent flaws in Access (trust me, there are lots of them). I’m interested in learning more about what other people are doing to solve this problem, or if there is a tool out there that had been fine tuned to this process.