Engage files Missing

May 31, 2012

My co-worker created an interactive Articulate-based training, emailed a published version to another department for approval, and left the company.

The other department has returned to me a 14k (blank) html, a pptx file and a desire to have the whole thing up and running with corrections ASAP.

I'd gladly comply, if I could see the interactions. Those files do not seem to exist. Must I recreate the interactions from (gasp!) scratch? I'm searching the shared drives for INTR files, PPTA files, and anything remotely connected with the presumed file name.

It was not standard procedure to package Articulates when this one was created. Therefore, I fear, that the originals are on her personal drive and invisible within the shared drives.

If you could please outline best practices for working on an Articulate with an Engage/Quizmaker on your personal drive and moving it to the shared drive for safekeeping/editing/etc., I'd REALLY appreciate it.

6 Replies
Peter Anderson

Hey Crisa!

Yeah, unfortunately without the actual INTR and PPTA files, I'm afraid there's not much you can do to recover the course... unless there's a way to contact the former employee in the hope that he or she might still have them and is able to package and send them to you. 

In the future, when working on an Articulate Presenter presentation in a collaborative environment with other developers, I'd recommend that you use the following workflow:

1. Use the Send to Articulate Presenter Package feature to make an exact copy of the project and the included Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes per the method in this article.

2. Copy the resulting zip file to your network drive for storage and sharing.

3. When you need to edit or publish the presentation, copy the zip file to your local hard drive and extract it.

4. Edit and / or publish the presentation.

5. Then repeat steps 1-4 as necessary.

By working with the project files on your local hard drive, you'll prevent any corruption or erratic behavior of the files that might have occurred by working on a network drive. Also, this method ensures that all your Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes stay properly linked together.

Wish there was more I could offer, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that those files turn up somewhere

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

Crisa, thx for this post and Peter, double-thanks for spelling out the workflow recommendation. Since I typically work as a "1-stop shop", this isn't something I'd typically run into. But as I read through the posts, creating a package comes up a LOT. I've made notes about this in the OneNote notebook I keep on All Things Presenter

Peter Anderson

Hi Crisa and Rebecca!

One more thing I should mention: If you send a Presenter package to someone, and they in turn use the Send to Presenter package function as well, the interactions and quizzes will not be included in the second generation package. This article outlines how to workaround the issue, including information on the unsupported but cool spy movie-sounding Project Beacon  

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