Storyline 360, Content Library Errors, and Web Security Software

Hi everyone,

Recently, we’ve had issues accessing Photos and Illustrations, as well as the preview modes for Videos in Storyline 360. We have finally discovered the solutions and I wanted to share our story with the community in case someone encounters a similar issue.

After Trial Version testing, we purchased a 360 license for more testing and to take advantage of all the great new features.

In Storyline, we encountered errors when trying to insert Photos and Illustrations – error icons were showing as the thumbnails of the images, and when we attempted to insert them into the project, we received an error message asking us to check our connection to Articulate 360.

Icons worked as they should, and Characters did as well.

When trying to insert videos from Content Library, we found that we could insert and download a video into a project, but we could not preview a video. After clicking the play button in the preview window, it just stopped and would not play.

After some forum searching and a support case with Articulate, we were directed to the Network Endpoints page on the Articulate website for URLs that need to be whitelisted with our network security service. IT made sure all URLs listed were on our white list, but all the issues with Photos, Illustrations, and Videos persisted.

Fast forward through hours of network activity monitoring, and scouring code from the Articulate 360 install/program files and we discovered the issues…

There are additional URLs that may need to be whitelisted that are not in the Articulate documentation, depending on the network and/or web security service your organization may use. Our security software is extremely specific, and image hosting sites are normally blocked. We assume that these URLs are third party Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that other vendors/services are using to supply the files to Articulate for Content Library.

We learned that a URL from Imgix (I assume it was just *.imgix.com) needed to be whitelisted to fix the Photos and Illustration errors.

To fix the video preview errors, we reached out to Articulate Support and asked if there were any additional URLs for videos as with what we found out from the images. There were, and we then whitelisted *.vimeocdn.com and *.vimeo.com, and that fixed all our video preview issues.

In short, if you are seeing grey triangles with exclamation points where images should be in the Insert Photos or Illustrations dialog box, then you will most likely need to follow these same steps.

Hope this will help other community members access and leverage the full power of Storyline 360.