What link to use?

Sep 03, 2013

I am getting ready to test my first Storyline course with a client. Yea! The client does not use an LMS, but will host this test course (and the real courses when completed) on their intranet. When we are up and running, the learners will access the actual courses by navigating to a landing page and selecting the course they want. But for the test, and because we don't have the landing page ready yet, we are going to email the test group a link to the course. They will be testing functionality on a combination of devices and browsers.

I published to a CD, sent the zipped output folder to the IT department, and it is now uploaded in the test environment. Good so far...

My question is which file do we include in the link?

I saw some comments that it should be the story.html file. My file view doesn't seem to show the extension and I don't seem to have an easy adjustment. Is this what shows in my Type column as a Chrome HTML Document?

Also, I ran across a comment that it should be Launch_Story (the Application file type).

And there is another Chrome HTML Document file called Launcher.

All of them launch the course on my computer. What's the difference between all these choices? And more immediately important for me, which will work best for a variety of devices and browsers? 

I would appreciate assistance or guidance to where the question may already be answered. Thanks!

6 Replies
Nancy Woinoski

Hi Rita, you should republish your course using the web option, not the CD option. The CD option is really intended to be used when either running the course locally on your desktop or for burning to a cd. Once you republish you should see a file in the published folder called story.html.  There is also a story.swf. You want to use the html one to launch the course. When viewing in chrome it will be chrome HTML document.

Rita Carson

Nancy, thanks for your quick reply! Sounds like my confusion then... 

I thought I saw somewhere in the tutorials or the forum that publishing locally (which I interpreted to mean for CD delivery) avoided some other issues. I couldn't really point to where I ran across those comments, so I'm not much help there. 

But I had bigger challenges in publishing to the web... (And apparently there is no shortcut to being a rookie!!) 

The client had asked me for the asset or a link to the asset. 

However, we don't have a file sharing system set up yet, so I checked and found that I could email it. (size was okay). But I couldn't seem to publish for web delivery, zip the file, and then actually get the whole folder attached to an email. I couldn't use the email option from the Publish Successful window to work for me because it defaults to Outlook (and I currently don't use Outlook).

Maybe you can give me an example of how it works if I published it for web delivery. It still lands somewhere on my computer, right? What happens next? What are some common practices for actually getting it to the client?

Thanks!

One addition. I figured out that I had to move the zipped file to my desktop, then I was able to attach it to the email. Yea, one step closer! Maybe you could still respond to common practices... I would be curious what most people do. Email is obviously not the most useful option.

Mike Taylor

Hi Rita! Welcome to the community.  Storyline can create a zip file for you that contains everything you need. Just click the Zip button when you see the Publish Successful dialog after publishing. 

Then, if that zip file doesn't exceed your email attachment limits, you can just send it on it's way. 

If you're looking to explore any other options beyond email Dropbox is a popular and free one tp check out. 

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