Batch publish mode?

Nov 15, 2017

I wish. WISH WISH, there was a batch publish ability in SL360. I work on 10+ projects at any one time and when they're finished it's normally a case of Friday afternoon, setting aside everything to simply publish.

Has there been any word on something of this ilk? I personally don't care if it's macro-clunky based, rather than polished. It will always get better :)

Many thanks

31 Replies
Walt Hamilton

It's clunky, it's slow, but it's better than what you have now. Highlight the .story files in file explorer. Right-click and choose open. They will each open in a separate instance of SL. Go through and publish each one. Take a well-deserved break while they all publish together.

Lawrence Eaton

Leslie,

File>Batch Publish (or even better, a shortcut keystroke)

Batch Publish dialog opens with "+" & "-" buttons to add storyline files 

Dropdown arrow next to each entry for publishing to whichever SCORMING/ TINCAN versioning you wish

Highlight each entry and adjust settings accordingly: i.e. Change of title, html5/Flash, mobile or desktop/laptop or both, and path to publish to. Check box for zip after publishing.

Click "Alleluia there is a publishing god" and go for lunch/ home for the night/ weekend. Drag yourself back into the office and open Windows Exploder and then upload files to LMS

I could work up a wireframe in Affinity Designer really quickly if anyone would be interested or like to chime in with their thoughts?

Mark Wilson

Hi Lawrence & Walt. I found this thread as I was wondering if anyone had any experience of publishing multiple projects at once. I usually wait for one to be done before starting the next but that is just due to paranoia of things going wrong.

Can I assume from this thread that you two never have any problems when publishing from multiple instances of Storyline at once? 

Walt Hamilton

I'm pretty paranoid, too. The thing about publishing is that if you always save first then publish, no matter how badly the publishing goes, the only thing you can lose is the actual publishing time. It's not like something going wrong while you are saving, and you can lose your project back to the last incremental backup.

I frequently publish two at a time, or publish one while I am loading the next, and haven't had problems. If I did, I'd delete the published file, and re-publish - no bigger deal than if it goes bad while publishing one by itself.

Mark Wilson

Thanks Walt. That's a good point that I should save before mass publishing in case I cause my whole computer to crash. But it looks like once you see the "Congratulations! Publish Successful!" screen then you can assume everything has worked as expected. 

I don't know why but in my head I thought that if you published 2 courses at the same time then random bits of text or objects from one course when start appearing in the other one!

Phil Mayor

Random text and images was a side effect of publishing in presenter as it used the cut and paste buffer. 

Storyline doesn’t have that problem, at one time I published up to 10 files at a time. 

I like the batch publish idea. I manage a series of 54 modules for a client and because of a bug (in Storyline not my work), had to update them all this week. 

Leslie McKerchie

Ah, sorry about that Calvin. Your description made me think the updater, but it looks like you'd like to see a similar function that Lawrence originally shared here.

I'd love to understand your thoughts and use-case on a batch publisher as well and you can even share those thoughts directly with our team here.

Calvin Lo

Here's what I sent over as feature request. Pretty sure somebody sent something like it already.

Basically, select which files you want to publish and the SCORM format. Have an option to zip them up automatically after publishing as well.

When new updates come in, we usually need to re-publish our old projects to apply the fix from that Storyline update. Right now, we have 131 .story files and growing. And if Storyline is going to update every couple of months, we need to do this huge publish very often. It's a huge time sink to do it one by one.

Walt Hamilton

Calvin,

There is a way to change your workflow, and save tons of time. If there is something about your course that isn't working, don't publish it until you have a work-around, or until Aritculate updates SL. If it is working, and you publish it, new updates to SL won't break published output, even if the update makes things that were working before stop working. SL can only change the .story file, not published versions.

Calvin Lo

It's not that a course is not working, but sometimes storyline updates have some fixes or enhancements that we want applied. to give you an idea, here are a few updates recently that were critical for us:

  • audio not playing automatically on chrome 66 (fixed may 8)
  • audio continued to play in HTML5 output when switching to another browser tab, causing animations to become unsynchronized (fixed march 6)
  • upgrading projects to Storyline 3 produced blank slides, and flickering in html5 (fixed march 6)
  • JAWS not reading text in notes at times (fixed Sep 11)

 

Raphael Cominelli

Hi, all.
Is there any news on this request?

It's been now several years since this request (and others like it) has been made, I wonder if there is any real commitment on Articulate's part to find a solution to this problem that seems to affect several users...

Is there a way for the users to have a look at the feature request report? You should made it public so that people could be aware of existing request and also upvote those they think could be useful.

Thank you.

Jose Tansengco

Hi Raphael.

I understand how such a feature could come in handy, especially for organizations that have a high volume of courses that need to be republished. While this feature hasn't made it to our feature roadmap yet, this discussion is connected to the report, so we'll be sure to notify you when we have news to share.

You can keep an eye on the upcoming features through the link below: