IE7 development pitfalls

Generally IE7 is a good indicator of an extremely bureaucratic, rigid and underfunded organisation that has zero respect for its learners and likely wants to produce overly didactic, outmoded, boring learning. That's the #1 pitfall in my experience.

All other difficulties are purely technical and therefore can be fixed.

I recommend you to build a simple pilot title that includes all planned functionality (quizzes? videos? sound? games? iframes? fancy fonts?) and see what happens.

My rant is definitely not against you, and I am really sorry if it could be understood that way.

Forcing people to use old software is exactly the same as forcing people to use old furniture, old displays, slow computers or ineffective air conditioners. It also means extra costs - like wasting developers time on working around IE7 issues instead of building better e-learning.

I do not have any doubts that you and your colleagues are doing everything possible to provide only the best e-learning experience to your learners, but first and foremost it seems unfair and disrespectful to you as a professional that you spend your time on caring about IE7 instead of doing something better.

Do you really find it acceptable that while some organisations equip their medical staff with tablets to provide better, smoother, on-the-go, just-in-time learning experience, you have to think about a program that is 6 years and 4 major updates old?

Let's now turn to a more productive discussion.

A few years ago a fair share of our courses (produced in Lectora X) was run on IE7 among other browsers, and we did not have any major problems, although page transitions were glitchy for some users. I do not know how Lectora 11 courses will work, so I really suggest building a pilot course with all planned functionality and running it on actual users computers is crucial, because you will also find out any potential problems with Flash, Java and other plug-ins that might be required.

:cool:

We also have to develop for IE7 and have found that line spacing and bullet points are the two biggest areas of concern as what you see in Lectora is not what you see in the browser window. It is annoying having to guess what a screen looks like when published, however, with a little patience it can be done.

As for your comments ssneg - completely and utterly useless and unhelpful. I work for a large organisation that indeed may be seen as bureaucratic - but zero, zero respect for learners? What a load of rubbish! Simply put, we have a very structured IT policy that revolves around our first priority - the care of patients and the system to support that care. It is our job to work within those constraints to produce engaging materials for our learners - which we are more than capable of. Please consider your comments carefully.

Thanks ssneg, I can see from your reply you only had my best interests at heart and I feel warm and fuzzy all over knowing that you care so much. You are right, until now, I didn't realise how little my employers were treating me unfairly and quite honestly with little or no respect. It's just not acceptable that whilst I'm typing this on my 386 PC (although I do now a graphics card, so at least all 16 colours are available to me - woo hoo!) other people around the world are using technology that's far superior. I'm going to sign out of here now, type out my notice of resignation and print it out on my dot matrix printer (email hasn't yet been implemented here, so printing will have to do).

As for my colleagues, they too thank you for your comments and right now are discussing how the hard work and effort they've put into providing a comprehensive learning experience tied in closely with facilitated sessions and a organisation wide OD strategy is simply not up to the standards expected of a modern organisation - a tough lesson to learn, however, they are not disheartened as they believe that one day we might upgrade to IE8...