Why does collaboration have to be so difficult?

I believe this is because of the way the software was originally interpreted to be used.  I believe and could be wrong here that Studio has been seen as the tool of a lone developer and was created in this way.

I have worked in a team using Studio and it is difficult if not impossible to pick up large projects from someone without having to relink documents, engage and quiz files. We used to swap computers if we needed to work on a file created by someone else.

I am not sure dropbox will work as the links are not relative.

I can't speak to the why of the original set up - as it was well before my time. But I think the main concern and reasoning for keeping it specific to one individual working at a time (the same reason we advise to work on local project files and not host them on a network or server) is based on the latency and versioning issues that can occur. I've seen other forums member mention Dropbox as a way to work together on all being able to access a project at the same time, but you'd want to look at creating a method to identify the different versions created as even in Dropbox if more than one person downloads/opens the file - they're changes won't be seamlessly integrated together into one document. 

You'll see the recommended workflow that you mentioned above in our documentation as well, and you may also want to take a look at this article on How to Organize and Manage your E-Learning Course files.

Thanks Phil and Ashley -- I can understand the permutations and consequences of unfettered collaboration where versioning becomes an issue.

I'm not trying to make a huge multiuser system -- in fact just having two users (me) is all I need.  For example my desktop and my laptop.  Actually I don't have a desktop I only discovered recently on a 19 hour overseas flight that my super-duper laptop draws too much power for the airlines seat-power and leaves me laptopless the entire flight... so I want to work with my small ultrabook when I'm on the road and my big powersucking HP when I'm at home.  But even that is challenging because of these file issue.  Dropbox and google both have ways (and I'm certain many others do) of letting users collaborate on files, it's just very frustrating to have to jump through these hoops.

Hi Jim,

If you're the only one opening the file, the versioning issues shouldn't be as much of a concern as you'd likely only have one copy open at a time on each computer. You will still need to download it from Dropbox or Google to ensure you're working on it locally. 

Okay, I don't want to download it just maintain mirror copies on both computers via dropbox which can sync up all the directories, what's most critical is making sure the directory tree structure is the same for all supporting directories (like roaming directories), so I think I'm going to have to experiment with two computers running the EXACT same version of windows as win 7 8 and 10 may be different directory structures for temp files.  I don't know.  If I figure anything out I'll report back.