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Mzinga Announces Industry-leading Advances with New Release of Firefly Collaborative Authoring Suite
BURLINGTON, MA, (February 28, 2008)
Mzinga, the leading provider of Learning 2.0 and workplace & customer community solutions, today announced the immediate availability of its new Firefly Collaborative Authoring Suite. This release of the Collaborative Authoring Suite, composed of the company’s premier Firefly Simulation Developer and Firefly Publisher tools, further extends the embedded instructional design and development efficiencies that learning professionals have come to rely on to produce the highest quality eLearning and software simulations.
Firefly Simulation Developer 5.0
Firefly 5.0, the latest version of the company’s Firefly Simulation Developer tool, features dramatic enhancements to the product’s three fundamental capabilities: depth and quality of the capture technology, overall instructional design and development flexibility, and an engaging end-user learning experience. With these additional enhancements, Firefly continues its long history as the premier software simulation development tool.
Robust Web Application Capturing
Mzinga has made significant strides in advancing Firefly’s existing capture capabilities by extending support to newer technologies such as .Net, and newer coding models such as those involving doctypes. Firefly also fully supports the tabbed interface of Internet Explorer 7.0. These enhancements enable developers to produce simulations that more closely and accurately mirror source web applications, significantly reducing development timelines.
Increased Development Flexibility
Long known for its ease of use, the latest release of Firefly offers greater flexibility in manipulating user interface controls. Developers can define custom object borders that replicate the style of any user interface control, including those in Microsoft Windows XP and Vista—effectively future-proofing Firefly against new programming languages and operating system design changes. Aiding in team collaboration, developers can also save their custom border styles as templates, apply them to simulations at any point during development, and share them with other project team members.
Enhanced User Experience
Firefly 5.0 also extends the product’s existing simulation modes—Show me, Teach me, Let me try and Test me—to include an additional, more exploratory user experience for learners. Through new customization properties, developers can create “sandbox-style” simulations without any guided instruction or feedback. This new output type, essentially a “Let me play” simulation, is particularly beneficial for intermediate to advanced learners, or during classroom scenarios where the simulations are used as exercises in a proctored setting.
“With this latest suite release, we’re building on the same instructional design and eLearning development principles that have always been core to our Firefly offerings,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Mzinga. “By doing so, we have even further enriched the learner experience and streamlined the development process, ensuring real business value for our customers.”
Firefly Publisher
This overarching theme of development efficiency extends to the latest release of Firefly’s sister product, Firefly Publisher 3.2, which enables team-based authoring of interactive eLearning courses in a Web-based environment. All Firefly Publisher courses (regardless of version) now support Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers, such as Mozilla SeaMonkey, as well as the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Additionally, the Firefly Publisher user interface can now be easily localized to any language, providing additional value for globally dispersed development teams.
As with Firefly Simulation Developer, Firefly Publisher 3.2 includes notable enhancements to object handling and course feedback. A new Flash-based engine provides better development control of shapes and other design elements, and new configuration options allow learners to be redirected to specific locations within a course based on test results. SCORM course completion conditions can also be fully configured to address varied corporate learning standards, and extend Firefly Publisher course compatibility with learning management systems.
Mzinga conducts regularly scheduled Webinars featuring its Firefly product offerings, which are available at www.mzinga.com.
About Firefly
Since its 2002 launch, hundreds of the world’s elite organizations, including Aetna, Nielsen Media Research, and CA, Inc. have used Firefly Simulation Developer to quickly and easily develop software simulations to enhance their training efforts. Firefly’s practice-based learning capabilities have enabled organizations to recognize tangible business results, spanning from development productivity gains in excess of 500% and employee performance improvements of 40%, to training delivery cost savings in the millions of dollars.
About Mzinga
Mzinga is the leading provider of business social media solutions to drive growth, innovation, and learning. Its combination of highly scalable technology, rich domain expertise, and moderation services enables businesses to harness the collective intelligence of employees, customers, and partners to achieve tangible business results. Marketing, customer service, and human resources professionals deploy Mzinga’s “pervasive community” solutions to achieve higher revenues, lower costs, and greater workplace satisfaction.
Mzinga, whose name means “beehive” in Swahili, is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, and is generating more than $30M in revenue with 150 employees. With 14,000 communities under management, Mzinga services more than 1 billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide.
Mzinga’s marquee list of customers includes such global brands as ABC, AOL, CBS.com, iVillage, Chevron Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., Mercer, Prudential Financial, Deutsche Post World Net, United Nations Development Programme, and Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
For additional information, visit http://www.mzinga.com/pr/
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