ToolBook Version 9 announced

June 4 2007. Today SumTotal Systems officially announced the release of the long awaited 32 bit version of ToolBook.

This has been a mammoth task by SumTotals ToolBook engineering team and promises well for the future of ToolBook development.
While the Product does not ship before “mid-June 2007” (in the US one assumes) SumTotal have provided preview versions of the upcoming release, which I have had the pleasure to work with. I expect the final product to be similar to the last preview version.

You can read SumTotals feature list here, or read on to learn my take on what the new features mean.

ToolBook 9 brings improvements in two categories

System improvements which may not sound like much but will indirectly make your life a whole easier, and New /Enhanced Features which provide you with new or better tools that you can use when you are developing with ToolBook 9.

Let’s first look at some of the system improvements

First of all I expect ToolBook 9 to be faster and a lot more stable to work with - especially when it comes to using activeX controls, and Automation in ToolBook. ToolBook's user interface is faster and more responsive - a related improvement is that native applications should perform better as well. This is likely to be a result of ToolBook being a full 32 bit application.

While speaking of Technical improvements I should mention that ToolBook now comes as a Windows Installer and that you no longer have to be a power user to author In ToolBook (something your IT department will like a lot).
On the same note ToolBook now have “internal” support for long file names and international characters in file paths. I for one am very pleased by this as this have been a source for many issues in the past.

In ToolBook 9 SumTotal have caught up with the latest “enhancements” for IE 7; among other things the “Click to activate” dialog (aka the Eolas problem) will longer appear on activeX controls (Flash, Media Player etc)

Now let’s look at the new features
There are two major feature improvements in ToolBook 9 as well as some minor ones which are nice to have but not earth shatteringly exiting (Enhanced Quiz Summary Tool, Question randomization now available through the lesson properties of the book, New “Go To” Feature, similar to what is found in MS Office).

The Major Features

The Book Explorer

It’s basically a tree view which gives a great overview of your content. It combines the page and Object Browser known from previous versions of ToolBook - but is much cooler. After having used it for 15 minutes you cannot understand that you could live without it.

SmartPages and SmartStyles

SmartPages and SmartStyles and manifests itself by adding to new Categories to the catalog, one contains the smartPages the other – you guessed it – the smartStyles.
The SmartPages category contains a number of pages with predefined functionality and visual apperance, and all you haver to do is add the text and pictures. If you think this is the same as the pages category or to adding your own custom pages to the catalog, think again. Drop a Smartstyle onto a ToolBook book using smartPages and the entire book will look different not just the background and colors but also the size and position of objects. It’s like CSS stylesheets for ToolBook - not quite but very very close. I suspect every ToolBook customer with more than one developer will want create their own smart styles shortly after upgrading to Blackcomb

Finally Sumtotal have revamped the ToolBook User Interface and dialogs to a modern Vista look, doesn’t sound like much but it is actually very cool to work with (once you get acquinted with the new Icons)

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the new features in ToolBook 9 and what it means to you, it is still early days as it is not actually shipping yet but I will update this page as more infromation become available so check back soon.

I hope you have found this article useful, comments and suggestions are welcome at tlund@elearningspecialist.com.

Happy ToolBooking

Tomas Lund