e-learning is a hot topic with us, as you'll be seeing later in the year. We also have a corporate soft spot for Adobe, though it doesn't run to paying for dinner.
Constructing e-learning in Adobe CS4 has always been a little fudgy, as the 'editions' of Creative Suite were built with "creatives" in mind - doing video, print or web stuff, but not specifically training materials. As a result you got some of what you needed, but things like Presenter were absent, and if you wanted Contribute and Soundbooth you had to take a chunk of apps you probably didn't want.
The new e-learning edition of CS4 is selected for training in the way we like to do it - you get the usual Photoshop/Flash/DW/Acrobat/AME apps to build 'stuff' and deploy it as a SWF or PDF, but also get Presenter 7 (to build rich-media seminars in Powerpoint), Soundbooth and Contribute. Fine, you say, we can buy them anyways.. but in this new suite, the apps (like Photoshop) get special extensions to help with e-learning-type-stuff, which you won't find in any other CS4 bundles. There's also a SCORM packager for people who like that kind of thing, and a workflow tool gadgingo to help you through the process of building a complete course.
Of course it doesn't include Connect Pro, as you can still only get the course-tracking features of CP through Adobe's subscription-based licensing, but if you want to push your training material out via your own website and not control access via CP, or use an existing SCORM framework, you won't care it's not included.
