It’s every e-learning developer’s worst nightmare: you’re hard at work in an application, deep in development, when all of a sudden—the software freezes! You start frantically clicking around...
Published 9 years ago
Version 1.0
Blog Post
I've always been an advocate of "Save Early, Save Often, Save As, and Save Local" having started out in tech support. It's good to see an "official" source that can be shared with IT support/new users. IT often requires proof, and they don't know how to respond to the emotional retelling of That Time You Lost A Week's Worth of Work and You Just Can't Go Through That Again.
Great tips about naming. I do recommend using YYYY-MMDD date naming conventions, because they sort better.
I use a variation of ShortName_v#-# for my Storyline files. The first number in the version originally is a 0 and won't change until release or client acceptance. The second number changes whenever other eyes look at the course. I've found that it's really easy for someone to get versions confused, especially at the end of a production cycle when the changes and QA is fast and furious (and frustrating). It makes it easier to avoid mimicking a vaudevillian skit.
Lastly I'll add a lower case letter to the name, and change it every time I save the file (either at the end of the day or when I'm feeling paranoid that there might be file corruption or that I've changed the file significantly, and it will be easier to roll back without too much re-work). The Storyline files don't take up that much space, and when you do your end of project archiving, you can delete all the unneeded versions.
So I might end up with a project file that contains the following Storyline files:
ShortName_v0-0.story -- First save
ShortName_v0-0a.story -- Second day
ShortName_v0-0b.story -- Second day, after major edits
ShortName_v0-0c.story -- Third day
ShortName_v0-1.story -- Stakeholder takes a look an at early draft
ShortName_v0-1a.story -- Fourth day
ShortName_v0-4-Issues.story -- Turned out to be another app glitching. Phew.
ShortName_v0-5.story -- Client Review
ShortName_v1-0.story -- Released version.
ShortName_v1-1.story -- SME suddenly remembered a critical detail.
And I totally recommend having a backup of all the Storyline files on a separate device or server while in development.
Great tips about naming. I do recommend using YYYY-MMDD date naming conventions, because they sort better.
I use a variation of ShortName_v#-# for my Storyline files. The first number in the version originally is a 0 and won't change until release or client acceptance. The second number changes whenever other eyes look at the course. I've found that it's really easy for someone to get versions confused, especially at the end of a production cycle when the changes and QA is fast and furious (and frustrating). It makes it easier to avoid mimicking a vaudevillian skit.
Lastly I'll add a lower case letter to the name, and change it every time I save the file (either at the end of the day or when I'm feeling paranoid that there might be file corruption or that I've changed the file significantly, and it will be easier to roll back without too much re-work). The Storyline files don't take up that much space, and when you do your end of project archiving, you can delete all the unneeded versions.
So I might end up with a project file that contains the following Storyline files:
ShortName_v0-0.story -- First save
ShortName_v0-0a.story -- Second day
ShortName_v0-0b.story -- Second day, after major edits
ShortName_v0-0c.story -- Third day
ShortName_v0-1.story -- Stakeholder takes a look an at early draft
ShortName_v0-1a.story -- Fourth day
ShortName_v0-4-Issues.story -- Turned out to be another app glitching. Phew.
ShortName_v0-5.story -- Client Review
ShortName_v1-0.story -- Released version.
ShortName_v1-1.story -- SME suddenly remembered a critical detail.
And I totally recommend having a backup of all the Storyline files on a separate device or server while in development.
- Those are some really great naming tips, Jennifer! Such a good tip to point out that the naming can make a huge difference when you want them to sort in a certain order. Thanks for sharing your expertise with the community! :D
- Thank you for sharing this naming convention! I like how you identified which versions were seen by the clients.
