Installation question

Apr 05, 2016

I've read on the website about Articulate Storyline and Quizmaker not being supported in a server environment. Does this include Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, where a virtual desktop can presented to the user as a persistent desktop that is managed on a virtual infrastructure such as VMware?

 

Regards

6 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Enoch!

Articulate Storyline isn't supported in a server environment, such as Citrix or VMware ThinApp.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) allows a single user to install their software on two computers, such as a work computer and a home computer. It must be installed on the computer's local hard drive (typically the C: drive).

Christie Pollick

Hi, Enoch -- Thanks for reaching out! My apologies if I am misunderstanding your question, but while we recommend that you work on your local hard drive as described here, you can certainly run Storyline in a Windows virtual environment. Common virtual environments include Parallels, Bootcamp, and VMware Fusion. You may also want to keep this sheet on System Requirements handy, as well. :)

Enoch Burke

Hi, Thanks for the feedback.  Your answer suggests that running the applications on Virtual machines with local drives is supported.  The Virtual Desktop infrastructure I mentioned is essentially the same thing (a virtual machine with a local drive).  All Virtual desktop infrastructure does for us is host a number of those desktops for different users with different applications specifically tailored to the individual users.  Under this configuration, would Storyline be supported?

Justin Grenier

Good Morning, Enoch.

Lots of folks run Storyline in a VM, and it works well overall.  This is useful for running Storyline on a Mac, for example, or for our QA Team who needs to be able to test Storyline across many different configurations of OS, Office Suite, and so on.

When we hear about a managed VDI environment, that makes us a little more nervous, since this often opens up the possibility of other environmental concerns:

  • Limited audio/video resources for multimedia handling
  • Inability to "see" (and therefore perform screen recording on) applications outside the VM
  • VMs running from a server, contributing to performance problems across the wire, and possible corruption of project content
  • Possible EULA violations

We also haven't tested Storyline in a VDI environment, so we frankly just don't know what might go wrong.  In the end, if you would experience problems in a VDI environment that are irreproducible outside of that environment, it's likely we wouldn't be able to help you solve those problems.

Hope that helps to clarify just a bit.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Michael,

Thanks for reaching out in this forum discussion. We still haven't done any testing in a VDI environment, so I'd imagine Justin's concerns still hold true for what could happen to the files and to the license in terms of the EULA violations. I don't know that I've seen any other forum discussions of users working through a similar set up, but hopefully if there are folks out there they'll be able to chime in here. 

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