Update: Articulate 360 will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 11

Hi Barry,

This thread is regarding the announcement that we're discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 11, but if you need assistance in hosting content in SharePoint, you can check out this article: 

Viewing Articulate 360 Content in SharePoint Online

Note that we do not provide support for hosting content in SharePoint, since this is an environment that does not support HTML, but we hope the article points you in the right direction. 

My original communication was concerning not only the discontinuing of support for internet explorer 11 but also the loss of "Publish to CD" option which we rely on heavily when we have issues connecting to our LMS.

Articulate plans to discontinue that option but without offering any real solutions.

In the past we "published to CD" on our Share-point and people have recommended "publish to the Web" then converting the files to .aspx but evidently that no longer works either.

I really wish Articulate would give us another option that would work for the modern Share-point.

Thanks,

Hi Barry,

Thank you for the feedback. We do have an open feature request for additional offline solutions for PCs and we'll drop a message here once an update on that feature becomes available. You can also keep an eye out on which feature are in the works by checking out roadmap. 

I believe this is a SharePoint feature change. It's certainly limiting, but since Storyline generates manifest data, I don't think Microsoft is going to change this any time soon. 

Hey, all who might be following this:

We LMS Admins and Learning Orgs must account for changes in browser related technology. 

My organization (mainly me and my application support team that maintains our LMS) had a bear of a time getting our content working on Edge. Shoutout to Taylor and others on the Articulate Support team. (Thank you, Taylor for the above and beyond!)

Ultimately, we spent too much time dealing with one of those very tiny issues that causes problems (secure vs unsecure HTTP links).

A bigger issue was an opportunity to make our LMS validation procedures more robust. Because not all our developers were updating their Storyline when updates occured, and while those WBTs worked on IE11, they did not work on Edge. (Storyline 360 isn't an option for us). 

As an LMS Admin (and Storyline developer), the headaches became an opportunity to update our validation and review procedures to:

1) Ensure any content being added or revised be built in current Storyline 3 version, and

2) Establish a firm republish/retire/revise protocol.

It has to be updated periodically to avoid the stress of things like Flash End of Life, and IE11 retirement, and other browser technology changes. So my validation procedures not include checking the Storyline build version before I start testing. And the content development procedures are being updated to include a minimum two year review cycle that will include republishing even if nothing is changing. We happen to have some content that has been around in one version or another for over 10 years. It's evolved, but still valid. And it must be able to function in the current Storyline build.

In my experience, the interruptive technology changes are more likely after two years.  Some are bigger than others, but if content gets republished in a current build at least every two years, there's less likely of the scrambles like Flash end of Life, or as we discovered, synchronous xhr.

Updating 150+ WBTs at a time isn't ideal. So read those release notes and keep content in current builds. :D

Hello, i know you have stopped supporting IE11, however can you still publish so that it still can be used in IE11?

I just received a support request from an internal staff member who could not launch a Storyline 360 course. When they clicked on the link, they were presented with this:

If this isn't enough incentive to abandon a browser which was out of date YEARS ago already, I don't know what is. Add to that, Saba discontinued testing its platforms on IE 11 late last year (I suspect other LMS vendors are, or already have, followed suit).

BTW, I told my internal staffer to contact our Help Desk. My time should not be wasted trying to troubleshoot an unsupported browser when there are others which ARE supported.

In theory. But does your organization still support IE11? Because that's a security risk.  

Hey All... i skimmed quickly, but just wanted to add a thought:  the Oct 2022 date for publishing with SL3 in on the assumption you are updating your SL3 app after that date.  If you don't have auto-update turned on, and/or don't accept the message to upgrade, you will still be safe after Oct 2022.  That's our case, corporately (where nothing runs automatically in either SL360 or SL3).

I'm **all** for getting rid of archaic browser tech and platforms, but sometimes in an enterprise setting, the web apps cannot be instantly fixed.  We have 18K+ users, using substantial apps, some of which are very complicated (and old).  Even Microsoft had a different distribution of their enterprise package ... IE11 is still part of our enterprise package in November 2022 (it was only removed from regular-world distribution / home users).  We are finally able to move to Win11 with Edge --but *must* keep the "IE Mode" whitelist active for a number of our servers.  We are procuring a new LMS, but again in government this is a long process, it's not a simple "flip the switch, we like something different"

But at some point, we have to deal with this reality --and sometimes it has to come this reality, to get an organization to realize the world won't stop moving forward just because an organization doesn't want to move with it.

All that being said, keep your SL app(s) from updating, and you can buy yourselves a little bit more time.

Please know continuing to use IE11, even IE11 mode is a stop-gap measure that just increases your organizations technology debt. Not just for you but for everyone reading this.

Also know that your content may be the reason you must use IE11 or IE11 mode.

When we were preparing to move our legacy apps including our proprietary LMS off IE11, it was a nightmare. A year in my life I want back. The LMS updates were relatively simple, but things still weren't updating properly when tested, or couldn't play at all. LONG story short is that a combination of neglected maintenance on the LMS, and outdated technology in our content caused nightmares.

Your Storyline output needs to be able to play on a browser as well as send the required data at the required times back to the LMS. If you use outdated Storyline versions, your output will include outdated browser technology.

The following all impact both playability and the ability to send data to LMS for the LMS to properly receive it:

* Storyline version
* Published settings
* If published Storyline is "clean" (not overwriting an existing folder)
* LMS standard
* Browser version
* Browser settings (including IT security and arcane things like "perimeter security")

How all this plays out with Storyline 360 I'm not sure, because we only use standalone Storyline 3.

Because of the issues we were experiencing, I ended up looking at every single content folder on our application server. Hundreds of them. I checked publishing versions for all of them. And documented them. In doing so, I saw all the content, and the differences. And I could see the patterns of what wasn't recording during testing, and what was. The problem content was all that still had Flash or older version of Storyline 3 with Synchronous XHR in them. Simply republishing in the current Storyline with current settings resolved the issues. (Thankfully the two that were published in Storyline 1 got to be retired).

If you've ever explored the output folders, and have been doing this long enough, you may be aware of the evolution of the folder contents, and the differences between publishing for SCORM, AICC, Web, or xAPI. I could write a whole article on that, but to sum up, settings matter. And clean publishing matters. There are times when your content will work fine as is, but those extra files from then are blocked or break things now. If you aren't republishing your content every two years or so to update them technology wise, you risk having them be unplayable, and/or a lot of work all at once.

Perhaps this may help drive some changes to give learning content and your LMS some love and attention.

My user base is 10,000+ active users, with 100+ active self paced, web based trainings, not including the quizzes associated with Instructor Lead Training, in Public Sector, using an older proprietary LMS. It's a struggle to get time and attention needed for our system and content technology wise, but recent years have helped decision makers see that it's not a Nice to Have, but a Must Have.