Captivate 5.5 - SCORM Project won't run after Captivate 7 installation

Question

Good afternoon,
I had completed a Captivate 5.5 project for a few months and as of about a month ago I have had Captivate 7 installed on the machine. Due to some widgets that are implemented in the project that only run in 5.5, I have not used Captivate 7.
I also have not had cause to reopen the project until recently to make some changes. However, now when I publish the files, package them in the MultiSCO Packager, and put them in CMS  - it won't run.
I've verified that the CMS is not the issue: if I repost the pre-Captivate 7 version it works just fine and the only changes I made to the original files were cosmetic and minor.
Now when I republish the files in 5.5 and package them, the files look different, publishing all of the zips into a "Linear" subfolder. I couldn't help but notice that this is the same as Captivate 7 publishes except without any accompanying XML files. Why would Captivate 5.5 be affected by Captivate 7 being updated on the machine?
Is there any solution to this other than having to open the 5.5 files in 7 and replace every widget? This is a huge expenditure of time when I was under the impression that if 5.5 was still installed it would run completely independent of the Captivate 7 changes.
Any help would be appreciated,
Jaimeson

Answer 1

Don't be too quick to write off the LMS/CMS as the issue.  You need to be aware that with Cp6 Adobe totally revamped their SCORM drivers so there is now little similarity between output of 5.5 to 7 in this area.  It is also no longer possible to use Cp7 SCORMs in the Cp5.5 era Multi-SCORM Packager tool.  They are not compatible.  You must make sure the CP7 SCORMs are matched with the Multi-SCORM Packager that came with Cp7.
Once you get compatible SCORMs published, try uploading them to SCORM Cloud LMS to test.  If they work fine on SCORM Cloud then they should work on your CMS (if it is truly SCORM compliant).
Your issue with the widgets not working in Cp7 might be resolvable if you update the widgets.  Have you checked with the original widget developer to see if they have updates available?  If you have several widgets of the same type and version in each project file, then there is a trick to updating all of them in one go (per project file).
See the heading in the lower part of this page:
http://www.infosemantics.com.au/adobe-captivate-widgets/widget-updates
But be warned that this only works if the widget filename is exactly the same, and you are doing this from the same computer that was used to originally insert the same widgets, because the path to the external widget file must be replicated.