Do you find yourself tasked with creating training, software demos, or client how-tos for your small or medium-sized company?

Adobe Captivate‘s new version, Captivate 3, saves time in creating these materials without overloading you with a high learning curve for the software itself. Captivate outputs your screen recordings in Flash format so that you can post the results to the web or distribute on CD-ROM. Captivate’s intuitive interface makes it easy to capture and annotate screen events via text and audio, and produce a professional-looking result in hours. Captivate’s first release, based on the earlier RoboDemo, was already easy to use for training. For quizzing, new question types and question pooling make creating tests with Captivate more flexible than before. You can more easily test the effectiveness of your training and identify areas for follow-up. The powerful annotation features allow you complete flexibility of text presentation in the video, but if you need to create documentation as well as demos and videos, Captivate also allows you to print to Word or PDF. Addition of music tracks or voiceovers is incredibly simple, as are the addition of static or interactive images.

I am not a Perl fan, but as a network administrator it has always been a vexing task to find backup software that can handle everything that can be thrown at it.

Especially as technology advances and the amount of space we use in our networks have exponentially increased in size. Another caveat is having mixed technology, it throws a spanner in the works for any backup technology. As far as backup hardware, it has fallen by the wayside, a tape streamer can no longer handle the huge amounts of data on a network. BackupPC, when run on a dedicated Centos machine with a couple of raided SATA drives does absolutely wonderful with backing up a network. It handles large files brilliantly, has an amazing flexibility in its configuration, and has a pooling, and compression future which is incredible with space savings. We have about 1.5TB of data that is backed up on our network, and takes less than 500MB actual space after the pooling, and compression. The biggest headache is to install it, and to configure it correctly, (a reasonable Linux understanding is a bonus) once that is done, it never has to be worried about again, except when you need to restore something, or add a new device to backup. Though it is always a good idea to do regular checks to see if the backups went through. The benefits of a working system outweigh any installation difficulties.