Admin Profiles and Articulate 360

Jan 19, 2018

Hello all. I'm having an issue I hope someone can help me with. I work in an environment with heavy firewalls for HIPAA and PCI protection. When working with an earlier version of Storyline, I found that these protections interfered with Storyline's ability to function. The only way to prevent frequent crashing and glitches was to switch to a Windows Admin account. I now have employees working for me who do not have Admin accounts, and while they have fewer issues than I had in the days of Storyline 1, they do still experience glitches and crashing. We use Storyline's recommended best practices as our own best practices. (Saving on the C drive, for example.) We have also updated, uninstalled, reinstalled, and troubleshooted. Still, for those who don't have Windows Admin access, it's glitchy. 

My question is this: Is it fair to say that, in some environments, Storyline 360 functions better with Windows Admin access? If it does, can someone help me prove it to my IT team? They need documentation, and I can't find any, though someone in Articulate Support did tell me to get Admin access a couple of years ago--and it was like magic. Please help. My employees are wasting time on glitches and crashes. 

7 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hello Rachel,

Sorry to hear that you are running into issues. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of them.

We have always encouraged our software to be installed with administrative privileges as you can see here.

We encourage the same thing during the install of Articulate 360 as well as you can see in this documentation.

If you're having difficulty though, one thing I'd have your IT Team look into is allowlisting endpoints to be sure that you have enabled access to all service.

Rachel Hanna

Thank you so much! The whitelisting should help. And yet, it seems even more proof is needed. Could you describe (because it needs to come from articulate, not from me) the kinds of errors, glitches and freezing that will happen if nothing on this list is whitelisted and a significant portion of these are blocked? In theory, could i expect the erratic behavior to get worse over time?

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Rachel,

If the items in the article aren't allowed or the ports enabled, Articulate 360 may not be able to connect and things won't load, open, or download correctly. You may also not receive important updates for the suite of authoring tools as those are pushed out directly to the desktop tray application. Similarly, you may not receive our email messages here in the E-Learning Heroes community or if you're connecting with our Support team directly. 

All in all, Admin privileges are required to install the software, but you should be able to run it as an end user. If a standard end user in your organization isn't allowed to download resources or connect with an external server (Articulate 360 in this case), then I'd ask the IT team to look at adjusting the security privileges of  your profile and what you'd have access to.

If they're real sticklers for details about privacy and security, you may also want to point them to our Trust center. 

Hope that helps! 

Katie Riggio

Hi there, Darren.

Sorry you're stuck on that step! The steps below should do the trick:

  1. Close Storyline.
  2. Go to the Start menu and locate your Storyline app.
  3. Right-click Storyline and select Run as administrator.
  4. User Account Control may ask, "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?" Click Yes.
  5. If the activation window appears, follow these steps. Otherwise, Storyline should be ready for use!

If that doesn't help, please let our Support team know here. They'll closely work with you and your IT team to get you up and running!

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.