Storyline 360 Collaboration Possibility?

Hello Alyssa,

Thank you so much for this information!

This was very helpful, considering our projects we will have a little bit more trouble working on separate sections, but we may be able to coordinate better now knowing that only one person can be in certain modules at one time. 

We will communicate who is working in which module, and when, so that our edits are saved. 

Thank you!

Happy to help, Arin! And as you're collaborating with your team, be sure to share any feedback you may have on how we can make Teams collaboration process and features even better! 🌟

Any changes on collaborative work in Storyline 360 for 2020? 

Hi Manoel!

We don't have any upcoming changes to share publicly but we love hearing new ideas. Is there a specific feature you're looking for?

As always, you can share ideas with us in the form of a feature request!

It would be nice if access to review-publishing and Rise-embedding could be shared by collaborators (or in a user group).

We are working on a project with 10 Storyline courses with multiple users. Feedback on the modules can be processed by any user, but only the first publishing user can publish a new version of the same course and only this user can embed the storyline object in a Rise module.

Are there any plans to improve this (or are there options available already that we don't know about)?

Kind regards,
Joris

I second the above request. Thanks, Joris. This is a major usability issue as team members transition in and out of a L&D team.

Our team is new to Storyline 360 and while we've figured out to assign each scene to a different developer, it's not an ideal collaboration situation. I can't make changes to my colleagues scenes as she is the original owner of her project and vice versa. So there is a lot of copy and paste going on once we find which slides were updated in the other project. 

Ideally, we would be able to have one project, therefore only one working file, that all team members can update. We're currently collaborating this way in spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. but not in Storyline. 

Hi Christina!

I hear exactly what you're saying and shared the comments with our team!

Since Storyline 360 is a desktop-based application there aren't ways for real-time collaborating like there is in Rise 360 which is a cloud-based application.

However, you could try to use Team Slides so there is a consistent theme throughout each individual project!

Yes, we are already using Team Slides. Since we're in different time zones, each day we work on our assigned scene, then publish/share the project. The alternating person opens the shared project, copies in the updated scene and tries to overwrite the existing scene. This is definitely extra effort and could easily lead to confusion. There isn't even a way to determine which slides actually got updated so that we only copy over the updates rather than an entire scene. Just a lot of work. Meanwhile, we use all our other tools collaboratively. My suggestions would be to allow for Team Project, rather than just Team Slides. While each person might download an update of the project in order to view the updates, the entire team would be able to edit the one project rather than the need for multiple projects and copying over changes each day. I'd be happy to show you what we're doing in SharePoint, MS Teams, Word, Excel, etc...

Regards,

Christina Bayma 

Good morning, Christina!

Thanks for taking the time to walk us through your team's process! It helps us understand the need for enhanced Teams collaboration features. I'll highlight your insight with the right folks and let you know of any changes.

A few related resources ↡

• Storyline: Recommended Workflow for Collaborative Network Environments
• How We Prioritize Feature Requests

One more thing! It looks like you may have replied by email where your contact info came through to the public forum. Feel free to edit it out right here! 

I second the need for Team collaboration in Storyline 360. Sharing slides, scenes and projects is not really collaboration as once you share those options, the team no longer has any visibility in real time as to what is going on. What is desirable is to allow different team members work on a scene, or slide in the same project as the others.

We've actually figured out a great work around so that we can collaborate on Storyline. We use MS Teams and SharePoint in our day to day work. So when one of us creates a Storyline project we save it to our MS Team channel under "Files". We cannot open the file directly from the channel, but can open it from the Storyline app by pointing to the folder where the story is saved. Since my teammate is in Poland and I am in the US, we can both access the same file and simply save our changes at the end of our shifts. No publishing or sharing required. I would think that anyone who has a shared drive where their team members can all access files should be able to utilize the same process and therefore work on the same story. I'm not sure you could have multiple people working simultaneously in the same file without saving in between changes, but you can at least work without the added steps of sharing/publishing between changes.

Maybe utilise Review 360? Would be good if we can have the option to 'publish for development' the work from Storyline to Review 360 and attached the .story file, so team members can review and make changes to the file and in turn also attached their .story version to the same review and allow the original project owner to see what version correspond to which .story file? At the end of the project, we can close the review and have the final .story... and all of this happens from within storyline.

I'm curious if you've never experienced problems using this process? I'd like to consider this but hadn't because of all the dire warnings I've seen about working from a cloud or network drive. Never understood why the claimed latency issues would affect these files any differently that other desktop apps.

I haven't experienced any problems other than the typical problems in dealing with cloud files. Utilizing the story on a shared drive/Teams has been a life saver for us. So far so good.

That sounds complicated. We use Review 360 when we have completed enough of our project or a piece of our project that is ready for review by our stakeholders. However, while we're in the development stage we utilize one story file on a shared drive that allows us to work on the story as a team. We can certainly breakout the story into scenes and assign scenes to different people but they are not separate stories that need to be merged later. Just one working file. Keeps it simple.

Yes, that would depend on the circumstances, in one of our projects, the project itself is massive. I think (from memory) amount to 100 slides. We can't break it apart, and teamwork on this project was a nightmare. Maybe we can improve on the design, I don't know, I wasn't the one design, but our team was assigned to update it with limited time.

Other projects, we collaborate on the design, or one designer stuck and asked another to review and make changes. Since we all work from home, we are using Teamviewer at the moment, but it is so so slow. So we have to copy it to local, work on it, once I completed my version, I copy it to the network drive again, then the same happens on the other side. I just thought it might be an even better way if when publishing we can tick a box to say publish .story along with it, so on the other side, another designer can 'download' the story rather than working with many versions of the file.

But I agree with you to try to keep things as simple as possible that works with the circumstances you are facing. 

I believe that having a real collaboration on Storyline 360 is a key point and the solution to share slides is not really something that is helping developers in working all together at the same project.  I add my voice to have a real collaboration feature on storyline 360.

Agreed! Adding my voice to the request for enhanced Teams collaboration features!

I agree. Our team is currently experiencing the same struggles mentioned already. We are in the same office, and we have shared the file on a flash drive or via MS Teams. To add to the difficulty, it seems like each time the next person opens the file, things that person doesn't even touch become broken. Quiz scoring, photos nudged off center, it really just goes on and on. We are working well together, but the tool itself is frustrating us.

II agree with all of the aforementioned issues regarding collaboration and add the following:

I would love to be able to publish a project to 360 review and have it appear on my team members' dashboard in 360 Review. Is there a way to do this and I've just missed it?

I'm new to Articulate's teams environment, so I'm hoping I've just missed how to do this.

Would indeed be very good to have a proper teamworking solution in Storyline. Teamslides are just not enough for cooperating in titles. +1 for that.

Hi there! 

Just want to add my 2Cents and echoing many others I think the Team Slides makes sense for having a central repository for your shared content but I think it would be great to be able to work in real-time on a Storyline Project similar to working in PowerPoint where you can work on a file as a group. Please bring Storyline to the Cloud :)

Adding my vote to this thread! Honestly, investing programmatically in developing a SaaS solution for real-time, collaborative Storyline authoring would be a strategic competitive advantage for Articulate.

I just look to all the really incredible online tools like photo editing, infographics, docs, etc. where my team can work on things simultaneously and wonder why this can't be done for instructional design/development.

All the workarounds (at the team level) add time, cost, grief, and risk to each project. Articulate — if you build the solution, you have a whole community of companies and people who will buy it.