About six weeks ago Composica contacted us to see if we were interested in having a look at their elearning authoring tool “Composica Enterprise“. We get about ten calls a week from authoring tool vendors peddling their wares, but the groupware functionality of Composica was enough to get me interested enough to try out a demo.

It is not often I get excited about software, but in one fell swoop Composica has solved a heap of the most irritating problems we face creating custom content for our clients.

We became so excited we are now an Australian reseller for Composica.

Centralised Project View

Having all the stakeholders being able to view and contribute to the project, in real time, through a browser, saves an enormous amount of time. No more sending files around to be edited and waiting for them to come back.

Simple Author Interface

Another brilliant aspect of Composica is the user interface; it borrows heavily from popular word processors, which makes it easy to understand.

Although it has a simple interface, Composica has a heap of serious functionality for developers. The properties of every element on the screen can be fully tweaked.

Look, it’s on the internet!

Okay, an obvious point, but not having to worry about purchasing licences for desktops is a real bonus from an admin point of view. Clients can just login to the site and they are ready to go … very, very handy when things need to be done quickly.

Accountability

One for the Project Managers. Composica has a built-in task list, and lets users annotate the work of others (the notes are not published with the content).

But is it an Authoring Tool?

Yep, it’s a great authoring tool, but as you may have guessed Composica is probably better described as as platform for  developing elearning content.

As I said, for me the most impressive feature of Composica is its groupware. Anything that enables a subject matter expert (SME), a flash developer, an instructional designer and a project manager to work on the same project simultaneously is a very good thing.

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You can read more about Composica here