Last week Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) announced the release of version 2.5 of the Adobe eLearning Suite, the suite of tools designed for trainers and developers that includes Adobe Captivate 5.5, Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 and much more.

In addition to purchasing the suite outright, Adobe is offering subscription services with price plans of $89 per month for the one-year plan and $135 per month for the month-to-month plan. If you know that you are only designing courses on occasion or you want to spread out your costs (as a small business might want to do), the subscription plans make a lot of sense.

Trainers who aren't interested in anything except Captivate can subscribe to just that for $39 per month for the year plan and $59 per month, for the month to month plan.

The latest version of eLearning Suite has some interesting upgrades including the ability to save Captivate files, which are natively Flash, as MPEG 4 files, which can then be used on the iPhone and iPad running iOS. It even includes the ability to create YouTube projects and assorted quiz templates to make the courses more interactive and interesting for users.

While this is clearly an incremental upgrade with nothing truly exceptional, there are some interesting features, especially the ability to subscribe to the software instead of paying $1799 for the new suite or $799 for the upgrade.

For more information:
- see the eLearning resources page on Adobe.com

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