Storyline 360 to SharePoint

Hi friends,

I feel that it would be supremely helpful to the entire Storyline community if Articulate provided support for SharePoint, OneDrive, and now Teams. They are viable and extremely ubiquitous intranet and extranet collaboration platforms and seem like a perfect way to deliver learning and performance support content.

I've tried the numerous hacks that are documented in this discussion thread and some work, but do so inconsistently. Is there nothing that the folks in development can do to help out the user community on this topic?

Do we really need to hack all these various systems or the content we've developed to get this to work? In many cases, we're working with a consulting client and have little or no influence in the client's intranet platform. But, Office 365 and it's family of products are so widely used, that it seems a disservice to the community and our clients or employers to produce content that can't be shared on that platform.

Yes, learning management systems are the most appropriate platform to provide content to learners, when tracking progress and completion of training modules or courses is important. However, there are many use cases where SharePoint is a more appropriate platform because it's integrated with a team collaboration site and is a performance support tool or just information distribution. 

Question for Articulate staff: is there anything being done on this? Or should everyone on this thread just give up and stop trying to make this work? I know I've spent countless hours trying to get this to work. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, honestly. If the answer is 'no', then the answer is 'no'. 

Hi Lisa,

Well, looks like you're doing everything correctly and you still get the Save As... prompt. What that tells me is that the SharePoint server is set to not allow uploaded .ASPX files to run and prompts the save as.

This may require you to contact the admin of the SharePoint environment (or the document library you're using) to enable running of ASPX files. You could also request that HTML files be enabled as well. If you can get that administrative change on the server side, you wouldn't need to do any of the copying and renaming. However... I've found getting those kinds of changes done at the infrastructure level is a tall order and affects security policies that most orgs have in place. So... this is the reason for the copy/rename workaround.

Since you're working in SharePoint, you probably have Office 365, which includes OneDrive. OneDrive is often more "open" to external content and may be set to allow ASPX and even HTML, sometimes. Again, this is controlled by organizational security, etc.

I'd recommend seeing if you can upload your content to OneDrive and test the running of ASPX (and HTML, while you're at it!).

Every environment is a little different (duh, John!) and it often takes some cajoling to get IT or SharePoint admins to adjust things for SL content to run. Having worked in IT and also on the Learning & Development side of things, you may be able to get this adjustment to security made without too much trouble. On the other hand, network and data security seems to get more locked down as time goes by, rather that getting looser. 

My experience is that spending time on the workaround may be more fruitful that spending time trying to adjust an org's security policies.

Let me know if the OneDrive approach is possible and if it worked for you!

I'm also curious if Articulate is looking at SharePoint integration with Storyline. With such a ubiquitous corporate intranet/extranet platform like SharePoint, it seems like a natural place to distribution web-based training outside the LMS environment.

Thanks!

John

Hi SharePoint Explorers!

Well, it seems like something has changed recently in SharePoint that is preventing anything I publish from running. I've tried the HTML > ASPX renaming approach I've discussed here previously, but that no longer works. I am at my wit's end on this. The only thing I've been able to do is load a published project folder onto OneDrive and then link to that from SharePoint.

At this point, OneDrive (or on a web server other than SharePoint) seems to be the best approach.

It seems like there are a growing number of users who want to publish to SharePoint from SL and SL360. If enough of us add this integration to a feature request, it could happen. Thanks to Articulate Support for listening to this awesome community!!! 

I'm sharing a mock-up of the SL 360 Publish dialog with a SharePoint option to inspire everyone! ;-)

https://articulate.com/support/contact/feature-request

Hi Leslie,

I learned that this process still works if I use the story_html5.html file to create the .aspx file. In the past, I always used the story.html file.

Thank you!

Also having issues with running Storyline 360 content on SharePoint. A while back I tried renaming story.html to story.aspx. The file runs on SharePoint, but because the code in story.html checks browser type and availability of Flash, it eventually redirects to story_flash.html or story_html5.html. At that point, SharePoint wants to download one of those HTML files.

I renamed those two files to have an ASPX extension, and then opened story.html in Notepad and easily found the references to story_flash.html and story_html5.html, changing those to look for the renamed ASPX files...

And it works! Not too much work to get things running on SharePoint. However...

I then ran into issues with imported content from Engage. Like Storyline, Engage publishes a handful of HTML files, which SharePoint insists on downloading.

So, I found all those files (a bunch, because I love the rapid development I can do with Engage interactions!!!) and renamed them to have an ASPX extension. And, without getting into the gritty details, I had to use Notepad to go into the code and changes references to the HTML files over to ASPX.

No luck this time. It appears that published Engage interactions seem to use JavaScript, CSS, and XML to generate the URL used in the slide frame in Storyline for the interaction. (okay, I got gritty there for a second)

The bottom line is, the Storyline content runs just fine (with either Falsh or HTML5) but the interactions result in a 404 page not found error.

I haven't tried, but I suspect the same might be the case for content developed in QuizMaker and imported into Storyline.

Yes, I could recreate my interactions in Storyline, but I like Engage.

I asked the SharePoint admin to see if they could just make an adjustment on the server to allow the running of HTML files, rather than forcing a download (Save/Save As) but IT security won't allow that to happen. 

Anyone experiencing this issue? Any clues? Seems like this could be a feature request to allow choosing HTML or ASPX as the output "wrapper" format... or even a SharePoint tab on the Publish page options. ;-) 

Thanks,

John

Hi John,

Gosh - what a tremendous amount of digging you've done to get this far. 

I'll admit, I'm not familiar with Sharepoint and helping out with specific hosting environments isn't really our area...but I had one idea. Have you looked at publishing these Engage interactions separately and uploading to Sharepoint? You could then use those to link inside your Storyline file as a web object.

It's a few more steps but if it works, maybe it's worth it? 

Hopefully others in the community who are more experts on Sharepoint are also able to weigh in here! Let us know what you end up doing in case others in the community come looking for similar in the future. 

Hi John,

I love your enthusiasm for this feature and sharing some details here. Thanks for sending along to our team as an official feature request too. Although we don't currently have publishing options that refer to specific hosting solutions, it's always good to know that it would help you and others! 

We'll keep folks posted if something like this is added to the roadmap. 

Hi John!

I completely understand how it would be helpful for us to offer support for integrating Storyline 360 content to SharePoint, One Drive, and Microsoft Teams. 

SharePoint Online doesn't play HTML files. As a result, SharePoint Online can't play published Articulate content since it includes HTML files.

I'm happy to continue advocating on your behalf for a better solution! In the meantime, we welcome the community to share ways they've customized Storyline 360 content to fit their needs.

Glad you found what you needed, Erika! Thanks for sharing your solution here. :)

Publish it to flash only and it will work.  SharePoint doesn't like HTML5.