Cp4 files published in CRM problems

[srigel1]

Hello.  I have created several Cp4 files and am using Windows XP Professional.  The Cp files are generally anywhere from 45 to 150 screens or 25-100MB.  I've been creating the files just fine in Captivate 4.  Then we publish the swf and a pdf of the handout generated from Cp4 to our company website.  More precisely, it's published in the PeopleSoft CRM space on our intranet.  This issues we're having include the file taking a long time to load when the student launches it through CRM.  And sometimes, some of the screens are blank although they look fine when I run it.

Do you have any ideas on how we could make the files launch faster or something we can do to make sure there are not blank pages?  And, these issues are intermittent.  They don't happen every time.  would it be better for some reason to put the Cp4 files on our Intranet and not house them in CRM?

Thank you for any advice you may have.

[srigel1]

Any ideas?

[RodWard]

If you want your files to load quicker, make them smaller.

I've found that different people working in the same company can have widely differing experiences for load times for Captivate (or any other type of ) multimedia content.

The intermittent nature of the apparent load times can be due to local or server caching of the multimedia files.  If someone else has recently viewed a large file, the web proxy may have cached it so that the next person seems to get it almost immediately.  This can make the actual issue (large filesize and poor bandwidth) harder to diagnose.

There's a nice little shareware app called Charles that enables you to find out exactly what your local bandwidth is when downloading or playing streaming content such as Captivate output.  I had one client that swore blind he had good ADSL bandwidth to all users so the bandwidth wasn't the issue.  Using Charles to observe stats on the download we found his ACTUAL bandwidth was something barely better than an old telephone modem.

People forget that available bandwidth fluctuates wildly depending on how much other stuff is happening at the same time on the network.