APEX Course Technical Requirements

APEX System Requirements Document

System recommendations

Apex Learning® products deliver a highly interactive, multimedia educational experience. Delivered over the Internet through a web browser interface, our products depend on specific software installations and configurations to provide the optimal experience for our customers. This document serves as a recommendation for the best user experience with our service and is updated regularly when new versions of third-party applications are introduced.

		Preferred System Specifications*
		PC	Macintosh
Hardware	Operating System	Windows XP ¹	Mac OS X v10.4 ¹
	Internet	Internet connection (Broadband preferred)
	Audio	Sound card and speakers or headphones Microphone required for foreign language courses
	Display	Support for 1024 x 768 pixel resolution Support for 256-bit color
	Other Hardware	Access to a printer Access to a fax machine (Online Courses only)
Software	Web browser	MS Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0 Firefox 1.5	Safari 2.0 Firefox 1.5
		JavaScript, Cookies, and Pop-Ups must be enabled
	Browser plug-ins	Current Java Plug-In installed (version 1.5)^2,3 Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 7.0³ Macromedia® Flash™ Player 8.0³
	Additional**	An email account Access to a word processor⁴ A multi-page TIF image viewer (Online Courses only)⁵

Browser information

Apex Learning products are optimized for use with Internet Explorer when using a PC. Other browsers that support JavaScript and CSS may be used with our products, but may occasionally fail to render a page correctly.

The latest version of Netscape Navigator (8.1) has been tested and is supported.
Some activities within AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, and AP Statistics may not function properly with Netscape 7.
AOL users should use AOL to connect to the Internet and then use Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Netscape Navigator to access our products.
Internet Explorer 5.1.6 for Mac OS 9 is not supported.
The Opera browser has rendering anomalies that users may find unacceptable.
The following browsers cannot be successfully used with our sites: AOL, MSN, SBC Yahoo!, Netscape 6.

Installing software

The Apex Learning System Check-Up examines your computer configuration and helps install plug-in software. Please visit http://www.apexlearning.com/systemcheckup and run the System Check-Up before accessing our products.

Important: Apex Learning products link to external educational web sites developed and controlled by third parties. We regularly review these sites for subject matter that would be inappropriate for our customers and for proper function. However, we cannot guarantee that such sites will work flawlessly with systems configured according to our recommendations.

*Use of older system configurations and software: The system recommendations listed in this document reflect the software and computer system configurations that Apex Learning actively supports. This means that we have tested and understand the operation of our service when using these configurations and we are able to solicit assistance from the vendors of third-party software when issues arise. Please be aware that if you are using older version of software or hardware than that in the list above, it is very likely that you will enjoy a successful experience using Apex Learning products as they are designed to comply with industry standards and have worked with prior software configurations. Our Support Team will do their best to help resolve any problems you encounter; however, it is possible that software conflicts or limitations will necessitate upgrades.

** The "HTML, Dynamic HTML, and Scripting" course also requires a basic text editor for HTML (Notepad, WordPad, or TextEdit), WinZip (PC) or StuffIt (Mac) and an FTP client.

Notes

¹ Previous versions of these operating systems have been verified to work with all Apex Learning products. Mac OS 9.2.2 is the current version of Mac OS 9 and should only be used when Mac OS X is not available. The only web browser tested for Mac OS 9 is Internet Explorer 5.1.7, which is no longer actively supported by Microsoft. Although previous versions of Windows have been verified to work with all Apex Learning products, we recommend using at least Windows XP. Microsoft no longer supports Windows 95/98/NT/ME.

²Microsoft Window users should download Sun Java 1.5 or later. Mac OS X users should update their computer to install any system of Java updates.

³ This software if available as a free download from the vendor.

⁴Word processors should fully support the display of RTF documents. Microsoft Word is recommended, but may require a purchase. A free word processor, AbiWord, provides Microsoft Word file format compatibility and improved RTF rendering for Mac OS X users and can be found here: http://www.abisource.com/.

⁵Microsoft Windows users may download the AlternaTIFF browser plug-in for free. Mac OS X users may use the Preview application bundled with OS X.

For Network Administrators

Apex Learning products are designed to be usable over a dial-up Internet connection. Bandwidth consumption is minimal, but a high-speed connection will improve the user experience. Caching proxy servers can be used very effectively to further enhance perceived performance, should your infrastructure support them.

Network configuration

Allow the following IP addresses/servers to be seen from your network:

• 63.251.169.0-254
• http://correlation.edgate.com
• http://http.vitalstreamcdn.com
• Should you have a policy precluding general access to the VitalStream content delivery network the following URL provides restricted access to Apex Learning resources only: http://http.vitalstreamcdn.com/apexlearning_vitalstream_com
To help serve our nationwide customers with faster page-load response times, Apex Learning has begun migrating our interactive and multimedia assets to a new service provider. To take advantage of these new capabilities, and to ensure that your Apex Learning multimedia content continues to function properly, customers with web filters that block access to web content outside of Apex Learning, will need to add a new domain name to their trusted sites within their browsers and web filters.

Please run the following test to discern whether any action will be required to enable the new domain name.
http://http.vitalstreamcdn.com/apexlearning_vitalstream_com/shared/images/test.gif

If you received the Test Successful message, no further action is necessary. If you did not receive this message, then you will need to prepare your network by enabling access to the following domain.

http://http.vitalstreamcdn.com
Allow content from our servers to arrive on your client computers through your router, firewall, and/or proxy server over the following ports:

• 80 (for HTTP traffic from our Web servers)
• 443 (optional - for SSL traffic from our secure Web servers)
To properly configure a caching proxy server, the following domains should be entered as cachable. The content is updated regularly, so the cache should be set to check for newer versions of the files:

• http://assets.apexlearning.com
• http://acecontent.apexlearning.com
• http://http.vitalstreamcdn.com