Mumbai: Elicitus, the award winning authoring software tool from Pune-based Harbinger Knowledge Products (HKP) has featured in a global report conducted by Brandon-Hall, USA, as one of the most popular authoring tools.

Brandon-hall.com, a leading independent expert in e-Learning, had conducted a survey on their web site to assess the popularity of various authoring tools.They received 257 responses and a total of 74 authoring tools were evaluated in the report.

Examining tools that scored a response rate greater than 5 per cent reduced the list to only 13 authoring tools. Elicitus, developed and marketed by Harbinger Knowledge Products, was amongst them.

Says Mr. Jayant Kulkarni, Executive Director, HKP, "Elicitus has emerged as the new refreshing authoring alternative, shoulder-to-shoulder with stalwarts like Microsoft, Macromedia and Click2Learn in this prestigious survey by brandon-hall.com."

The brandon-hall.com report says, ''Although Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are popular tools and are commonly used to create online training content; they lack features that many e-learning authoring tools contain. Shortcomings include an inability to create anything other than the simplest assessments, inability to communicate at the detail level with learning management systems, static page-turning content, and limited use of audio/video/animation - among many others.''

Mr. Vikas Joshi, CMD, Harbinger Group, adds: "As the report points out, several of the popular authoring tools such as Word and PowerPoint are general-purpose content creation tools. Given this, Elicitus is one of the few ''most popular'' e-Learning-specific authoring tools."

  also see : List of reports on Harbinger