Forum Discussion
Rise courses across US & EU: Why are we still unable to transfer courses between data centers?
Articulate users working with clients in different regions (US + EU), did you know that you may hit a serious limitation in Rise? You can’t transfer Rise courses between data centers.
Here’s the situation
Articulate introduced the EU data center. Good move. But in practice, this split European users into two groups:
- Long-time users → most likely still on the US data center (unless they explicitly switched)
- Newer users → most likely on the EU data center (the new default for Europe)
The problem?
Rise courses cannot be shared across data centers. And Articulate’s solution? There isn’t one.
Yes, you can switch from the US to the EU data center, but then you’re stuck:
- No migration path
- No export-import for Rise courses
- Switching data centers = rebuilding everything from scratch (!!!)
What this means in real life
For anyone working across multiple clients, this creates a real headache:
- Established European clients often stay on the US data center. Not by choice, but because rebuilding everything isn’t realistic.
- Newer European clients are most likely on the EU data center.
- Freelancers and agencies working across both end up stuck in between.
Articulate’s “solution”?
- Ask your client to pay for an extra seat so you can work in their environment.
- Pay for two licenses yourself (US + EU).
I think both are unacceptable. For a tool so widely used across Europe, the inability to move content between data centers is a significant gap. And I genuinely don’t understand why Articulate doesn’t prioritise finding a solution (a real solution!) to this issue.
What I’d like to hear from European users
- Are you staying on the US data center because switching isn’t realistic?
- Has anyone actually switched to the EU data center?
- How are you dealing with this in client projects where you are on different data centers?
- And how do you feel about how Articulate is handling this?
8 Replies
I started using Articulate Rise about 5 years ago on a US-server. I did built a lot content. switching to EU-server would mean a loss of this content.
I think Articulate delivers very bad services in not making migration possible. And if they are unrelieable on this topic there wille be more.We started out on the US servers a long time ago, but as a public organization, we’ll probably have to continue using the EU servers. Furthermore, this transfer issue may prevent us from sharing modules with external partners.
It’s strange that Articulate hasn’t offered a solution yet (other than rebuilding everything block by block!). I see that this issue has been raised for at least a year, but the company hasn’t responded.
We’ll need to review this matter before our next renewal!
Hi annicksmeers-5a,
Thanks so much for reaching out!
Once you choose a region (EU or US), your Rise/Review content and collaboration remain within that region. While that does limit cross-region collaboration, we built it that way for customers who’ve told us they need strong data separation in order to maintain compliance.
I'd love to learn more about how this is impacting your team.
- How often do you run into this situation?
- Are there specific collaboration scenarios where it's creating the biggest challenge?
- Are you using any workarounds today?
These details will help our team better understand how this affects your workflow.
Hello Kelly ,
thanks for your posting. This resonates a lot. I've been an Articulate customer for many years too, from before the EU/US data center choice even existed — so I never made an active decision, I just ended up on US by default.Right now this is causing a real problem for me: the "Send a copy" feature is right there, both my client and I can see it, but I simply can't send the course because we're on different data centers. My client doesn't understand why something so basic isn't working, and since this is a future-must-have for them, I'm likely going to lose a follow-up project over it.
I'd honestly be happy to pay for a proper migration. What I'm not willing to do is rebuild courses from scratch as a "solution," and or buying an extra subscription just to work around this (even if I get 1 year "for free") - this isn't realistic for a small business like mine.
What frustrates me most isn't even the technical limitation itself, it seems we have too little transparency into whether this is actually being worked on or not in the planning.
Would love to hear from anyone at Articulate: is this actually on the roadmap, or is it simply not a priority right now?
Hi ChristianSch997,
There doesn’t seem to be any real intention from Articulate to address this. We keep getting the same answers over and over again, without the actual issue being addressed.
First, I’m amazed that Articulate keeps asking how this affects our workflows. The impact seems pretty obvious: users on the US and EU data centers simply cannot exchange copies of Rise courses. For global organisations and people collaborating across regions, that’s a fundamental limitation.
Second, Articulate keeps referring to the need for data separation, while ignoring the fact that the two data centers could remain completely separate. What we’re asking for is a way to export a Rise course as a file and import that file into another Articulate environment. The course data wouldn’t need to be transferred directly between data centers at all.
And we know this is technically possible. Mindsmith already allows Rise courses to be imported this way (with a pretty good result). So at this point, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see this as anything other than a lack of willingness from Articulate to provide a workable solution for its global users.
Imagine if you created a Word document in Europe and were told there was simply no way to share that document with a colleague in the US. Yet that’s essentially the situation we’re dealing with for Rise courses.
But. Articulate. Just. Doesn’t. Care.
Hi.. I was fooling around with AI and it gave some sort of solution... you can publish your course and use this tool to break it to word documents. Then use Rise AI to bring those word documents module by module to an empty course. Rise AI doesnt understand all but maybe this helps a little.
its like a fake import :)
This sounds like a frustrating limitation for freelancers and agencies working with clients across different regions. Having to maintain separate licenses or rebuild courses because they’re tied to different data centers can create a lot of unnecessary work. It would be useful if Articulate introduced a proper export/import or migration option for Rise courses between the US and EU data centers.
