I recently had a client who wanted to provide CDs to his users containing Captivate lessons. He had two particular requirements for the lessons on the CD:
- He wanted the lessons to be password protected to ensure only authorized users could view the lessons
- He wanted the lessons to expire after a certain amount of time to ensure users came back to him to get a fresh CD when the lessons had grown stale.
We were able to easily meet the client's needs using features native to Captivate.
- Open a Captivate project
- Choose Edit > Preferences
- Select the Start and End option from the Project category
- Click in the Password protect project and type your password (keep in mind that the password you enter is case sensitive… you should alert your users to this fact)

If you were to click the Browse button to the right of the Password protect project field, you would see the Password options dialog box below.

Using the Password options, you can specify what users will see if they do not type the password correctly. (You could use the Retry message to remind your users that the password is case sensitive.)
- To select an expiration date for your project, select any date from the Project expiration date drop-down menu (You can include two message lines that users will see should they attempt to access an expired lesson.)

- Click OK and then publish your lesson
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