I came from Toolbook to Lectora about five years ago and have dabbled with several other authoring packages as well. A few months ago I was asked to produce a project using Articulate Suite. I had heard a lot of great things about Articulate and was eager to try my hand at it. After about a week and a half and several hours with PowerPoint and Articulate I ended up re-building and finishing the project using Lectora.
Although the Articulate Suite 9 is a mature product, I found that there were a lot of short-comings developing with the PowerPoint/Articulate duo. Without going into a lot of detail, I found it frustrating trying to build simple event-driven interactions, intelligent menu systems, tracking, multiple feedback, etc. I had hopes for Engage, but found that it really couldn’t deliver what I was looking for either. Compatibility between the software programs was also an issue and produced some odd results.
I’ll have to admit that I have come to depend on the variable, action, and scripting capabilities of both Toolbook and Lectora for my development needs. And I’ll throw Flash in there as well as I’m spending more time with it lately. I guess it all depends on what you are comfortable with and what level of development you expect to produce with the tools available to you. I’m sure that there are folks out there who can develop some great e-learning with PowerPoint/Articulate, but this time around I’ll recommend Lectora as a development platform.
