Default Folder to Publish To

Hi Emily,

Thanks for your reply.  In the past, what you have described is exactly what my publishing has done, it has defaulted to the C drive.  The new IT policy overrides that and now pushes it to a private network folder.

What I want to do is avoid having to use the ellipsis button (and navigate to my C drive) every time I want to publish, and instead change the properties of the default publishing folder. 

Cheers,

Tanya

Hi Tanya,

It sounds like you're saying that there is a new policy in place that has determined your default settings in regards to publishing location and behavior? I don't believe there is a way to change that default behavior from within Studio. 

Have you reached out to your IT team to see if they had any suggestions? 

Hi Ashley,

Yes, spot on, the policy has replaced my old default settings with new ones.  I've chatted with IT and given that they are not familar with Articulate software asked if I could seek an answer from the community.

Of course you can Tanya! Hope someone is able to help you out!

Hello,

I work for a law firm and we have folder redirection in place which puts the My Documents folder in a network location. This causes all kinds of problems with Articulate software. We really need a way to change the default save location. It's problematic having to do it manually at every save.

Ben

Hi Ben! You are welcome to share those thoughts here with our development team :)

Thanks, I have forwarded the issue to them.

Ben

Thank you Ben!

Ben,

Did this issue get resolved?  Every time I want to save, I have to manually change the drive letter from C: to where I really want the materials saved.  Sometimes I forget and it saves it on C:    This should be an available setting in Articulate.  That's programming 101. 

Hi Gregory,

We recommend publishing and saving to a local drive to prevent latency issues associated with network drives as described here. When you install Storyline, you should see the "My Articulate Projects" folder installed as a part of the "My Documents" section of your system. 

Ben shared his thoughts in the form of a feature request, based on our current recommendations to work locally. I know a number of folks in the forums have shared that it does work for them to save or publish to something other than the C drive, but based on the issues mentioned it could cause odd or problematic behavior in your files. 

Ben is entirely correct. We should be able to save to whatever default drive/folder we choose in preferences like every other program on the market. It is a pain to have to reset to my desired 'save to' folder every time that I publish a Presenter 13 file. I understand that you do not want them to go to network or flash drive locations, but there are lots of other locations/drives that function perfectly well other than C:/My Articulate Projects

Hi Doug,

Thanks for reaching out here and sharing your thoughts. As you can see, it's been a topic of discussion and there isn't yet a change to the behavior of Storyline or Studio, but you're welcome to share your thoughts here as well. 

Hi Ashley, has this one been sorted yet?  It's not a big deal but a bit annoying having to manually enter the publish location each time.  I recently reinstalled S2 and since then, it keeps defaulting to the installation files location.

Any ideas?

Hi Rodney, thanks for chiming in!

Are you saying that since the reinstall, the publishing location defaults somewhere besides C:/Users/YourName/Documents/My Articulate Projects?

I'm having a problem at the moment. Storyline 2 is installed on my work laptop.  The software is stored on the C drive, but the IT policy at work re-directs the working directory to a network drive:  (h:\Documents\My Articulate Projects)

When I'm at not on my work network I can't access this folder. When I try to launch Storyline 2 I get an error saying it has "stopped working" and won't launch.

Does Storyline check for a working folder on launch? Is there anyway around this or is it a different issue entirely.

Hi Jane,

Sounds like there is a disconnect happening and we recommend working entirely off of your local drive with both your software and your files.

I've got the same issue here "C:\users\<my name>\Documents\MyArticulateProjects" doesn't really exist. Ours are redirected to a network location.

it seems to me in reading through this thread that Articulate doesn't truly understand WHY people are making this request.

1. We understand, your recommendation is to work off of a local directory. We don't always like it, but we get it.

2. We need YOU to understand that we don't have the option of saving to our local "my documents" folder...because it has been, at the Operating System level by our network administrators, redirected so that it lives on the network.

3. Articulate forces us to use a predetermined default location that now points to a location that, if we have a problem with a file, you will say its because it is in an unsupported network location...(back to #1)

SO....

4. We need an option to be able to set the default "Save to" location from within the product so that we CAN save to a local directory without a bunch of repetitive steps every single time we create a new project.

I get that you recommend that we save locally, but in this case our inability to use the mandated default location should outweigh your desire to force us to, so we should be given the option...even if that means more support calls for you.

Just my $.02

Hi Matt,

Thanks for that feedback. I know this has been an ongoing discussion about working on local project files, and why that's important. 

From my understanding, there are a number of reasons why working from a network drive can cause file corruption, namely...

• Latency: This means that the network drive is constantly syncing in the background, and this can cause unwanted problems if you open a file saved to the network.
• Long file paths: W:\My Documents\Articulate\MyStory.story actually means \\MYDOMAIN\MYSERVER\MYSTAFF\MYDRIVE\MYPROFILE\My Projects\Today's Project\Long Project Name.story (and often much worse).  Long path names are really difficult for most applications to deal with, and while open, Articulate projects themselves are made up of many nested levels of organized content.

Also, if a file is opened by several people on the network, or if the network connection crashes, file corruption can occur. 

It's for these reasons that we, along with Flash and Captivate, have discouraged working from a network drive for quite a long time.

Ashley-

Totally understand all of that and I think most of us do. We're just trying to save some clicks by not being having to save to our My Documents folder if our internal network team as made it where "My Documents" actually lives on the network.

Ashley,

I would like to follow up with this specifically because of Articulate's recommendations on naming conventions. I have had issues with long file paths specifically because of the default, and have begun storing all of my .story files at
C:\Storyline\

instead of

C:\Users\Work\Documents\My Articulate Projects\

To add even more to this though, the folder that you create for us is "My Articulate Projects", after stressing in numerous places to NOT use any spaces in either the file name or filepath, it seems crazy that the default does exactly that.

I am also submitting this as a feature request, but am not optimistic for a change, as there are multiple forum posts and several people have stated that they have requested this already, going back multiple years ago. 

Thanks for submitting the request Michelle.

I wanted to share some information about how we manage these feature requests as that may be helpful. 

Hello! Just wanted to check back in on this thread and see if there was now a way to change your default save/publish to location in Storyline? The default location doesn't work for me as a matter of process and backup. Thanks!

Hi, Chrisie. Welcome, and thanks for checking in!

Just to be sure, are you looking to change the default C:/Users/YourName/Documents/My Articulate Projects location in Storyline? If so, here's a quick Peek recording on how to modify it along with some pointers.

Does that help? Let me know if you meant something else! 🙂

I have for years saved my story file to C:\Projects and publish to C:\Publish. Just create each of these folders on your C:drive. And of purse at least once or twice a day I copy the story file to our network folder as a backup while I’m in development.