Storyline 2 crashing when trying to publish to Dropbox public folder

Do you have Dropbox installed on your computer, so that you can publish to your public folder locally?  This is what I do and it works dependably.  If there's any other way to publish content to the dropbox public folder I'm not familiar with it.

If you're somehow trying to publish directly to a web-based or network-based location, that isn't supported in Storyline - http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline-2/create-edit-and-publish-articulate-storyline-courses-on-your-local-hard-drive

Hi Brian,
I have Dropbox installed and am publishing (browsing to the Dropbox folder, like I would any windows folder) in exactly the same way I have always done with storyline 1, when it worked fine. The file appears to be publishing and then at the last minute it pops up with the error. I have verified the same is happening with colleagues.
Thanks.

I'm running SL2, latest update, and just tested publishing to my dropbox public folder on my local hard drive and didn't see any errors, it was a successful publish.

I'm wondering if it may be something in your local environment?  Would be odd, but it's the first place I'd start troubleshooting if it were me, especially seeing as how your colleagues are able to replicate the issue but others outside your environment (like me) aren't experiencing issues.

Hi Elissa,

Can you publish directly to your desktop just to confirm that publishing overall is working as expected? You mentioned it's also happening with colleagues - did this just start occurring after the update 5 of Storyline 2? If so, it may be worth you going through the repair. 

Hi Ashley,
Thank you for your suggestions. I can publish locally to my desktop fine - that has been my workaround.
This did not just start happening with update 5 for SL2, but I will try the repair anyway.

Elissa

Ok - so it's not publishing overall, just directly to dropbox. Have you confirmed it's a local install? 

Hi Ashley,
Correct. I can publish fine to my desktop or to another location on my C drive.
My dropbox is installed locally – the path is: C:\Users\\Dropbox.

I used to publish all the time to dropbox from SL1 – so it seems something is working differently in SL2.

Thanks,
Elissa

Hi Ashley
Yes, the issue is just with publishing to Dropbox. As this was not an issue and I could publish fine to Dropbox with SL1, I don't imagine it's a set up issue with Dropbox.
Do you have any suggestions of what I can check with Dropbox? I have Dropbox installed on my PC and I can navigate to the Dropbox folders from Windows Explorer, like any folders I have on my C drive.

Hi Elissa,

I don't publish to dropbox often (I normally do it right to my C drive) but I just tested this, and everything worked fine. Did you check the file name and path to ensure it adheres to the other guidelines in this article? 

Problem solved!! ☺
I changed the output file to a much shorter name and it worked.
I noticed that the automatic output folder name for SL2 is longer than it was for SL1… SL2 has added “- Storyline” to the output folder name, (i.e. SL1 output was “ output”, and SL2 is “ - Storyline output”), and this difference must have pushed the file name over the limit for the number of allowed characters, so it was failing in SL2 when it didn’t in SL1.

Thank you so much for your help, Ashley!

Thanks for the update Elissa and I'm glad it was such a simple fix! 

This is actually happening to me now with Storyline 2. It's not an error--the page just never loads. I've tried on two different connections so doesn't seem related to internet connectivity. If not the dropbox public folder (and i saw a message already from the community about google drives not working either), then how are you sharing draft output with colleagues, short of sending .zip files or something like that. 

Dropbox still works for me, but here are some other options that may work for you. Tempshare is a really good option if you only need your content to be available for a short period of time...

https://www.articulate.com/support/storyline-2/publishing-and-sharing-articulate-storyline-content-sl2

Hope this helps,

B

And here's another great article that may be helpful - http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/5-easy-ways-share-e-learning-courses/

Hi Sarah,

I also wanted to confirm are you trying to publish direct to the Dropbox folder, or after you've published uploading to the Dropbox folder? I'd encourage the latter set up. I also use the Tempshare set up, and the first article Brian linked too also includes information about Amazon S3 which is a good hosting solution as well.