Upgrade Question

Hi there, Jill! I'm sure you're going to love all of the goodies that are part of Articulate 360—especially all of the nice enhancements we've made to Studio. Below is the complete lowdown on Articulate 360. Please forgive my response for being a bit long-winded but I wanted to try and address all of your questions/concerns!

Articulate 360 is an annual subscription that includes everything you need to create e-learning. Your Articulate 360 subscription includes authoring tools—Storyline 360, Rise, and Studio 360. No matter which authoring tool you choose to use, we've made sure your courses work on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices without any extra effort on your part. The Articulate 360 subscription also includes an ever-growing asset library (currently over 3 million assets!) full of templates, characters, photos, illustrations, icons, and videos. You also get Articulate Review—our new, awesome review tool for getting feedback on your e-learning projects from stakeholders and SMEs. And you get access to Articulate Live training webinars which are all designed to help you get up-to-speed with the tools in Articulate 360 and grow your skills as an e-learning developer too. 

Studio 360 remains a PowerPoint plug-in and it operates much the same as you're used to, but now with some integration with the other apps in Articulate 360, like Content Library (the asset library I mentioned above) and Articulate Review. I find these new features make it even faster and easier for you to create e-learning presentations from PowerPoint.  

You mentioned that you like the ease of working in PowerPoint and Studio, so you may want to take a closer look at Rise—the new web-based authoring app that's included in Articulate 360. That's because courses built in Rise come together in minutes, they look totally fresh and modern, and they work great across all devices. I recently wrote this article for folks who are transitioning from PowerPoint to Rise that might help shed some more light on why you'd choose one or the other.

Articulate 360 (and therefore Studio 360) outputs to SCORM (versions 1.2 & 2004) as well as AICC, and Tin Can. As long as your new LMS supports those industry standards, any courses you create with Articulate 360 will work just fine. If you want to learn a little more about working with Articulate 360 in the cloud, this article lays it all out for you. And if you'd like to understand more about cloud computing in general, this article is a good place to start.

One last suggestion: if you haven't already done so, download the free 60-day trial of Articulate 360 and check it out for yourself! 

Hope this was helpful. Sorry it was so long-winded!