Storyline 360 zip packages "missing" folders in "story_content"

Howdy,

I'll preface this by stating that I don't have Articulate myself but support a number of elearning developers who do and am familiar with how elearning development tools work, SCORM packaging etc.

 

Course wouldn't play on Workday:

We recently migrated to Workday as our LMS and have found a peculiar issue that seems unique to the Storyline 360 product.

A brand new course was created that contained some slides with video content. This course was uploaded to Workday and it failed to play past the first slide (you would just see the 3 "loading" dots). Using dev tools, I could see that a .m3u8 file, that was in a hls folder "video_5hMXO84aCgj_48_960x490.hls" under the "story_content" folder could not be found (404 error). 

 

But the same package played fine on SCORM cloud and Cornerstone LMS:

Oddly enough, this same exact SCORM package worked without issue when loaded into SCORM cloud or our Prior LMS Cornerstone.

 

Missing Files?

To test a bit further, I opened the SCORM package by double clicking it in Windows and couldn't see any folders in the story_content folder. Extracting it by right clicking the zip and choosing extract also resulted in no folders appearing there. However, if I used 7-zip to browse or extract the SCORM package, the folders appear. If I then rezip it and upload to Workday, the course plays without issue.

I've never seen anything like this, the files don't have a "hidden" or system attribute from what I can tell, they just can not be viewed or extracted properly by the built in Windows file compression tool (and I'm guessing the tool that Workday uses to extract media packages).  Again, 7-zip is able to extract them without issue. 

 

Known zipping issues with Storyline 360?

Does anyone know if there are any issues with the way Storyline 360 creates and zips it's SCORM packages?

 

Screenshots:

Below are some screenshots from another course we published from Storyline 360 just to see if we could reproduce the issue from another person's machine. 

1> Windows Compressed Folder Tools only sees 2 files in "story_content"

2> Extracted using Windows "Extract All", still just 2 files. 

3> Extracted using 7zip - the folder finally appears

At this point, I can just zip the course back up using any tool I wish (even the built in windows compression tools) and it will work in any LMS I load it into.

This seems to indicate that Windows can compress the course contents fine, including the "missing" folders, there just seems to be something odd happening if you allow Storyline to handle the zipping itself.

I do want to report this to Workday, perhaps they can change how they media packages get extracted so that the problem is a non-issue as it is on SCORM cloud, but because I can replicated it so easily even in Windows makes me there there's a problem to fix at the publication level as well. 

 

Bonus:

I do realize this is a weird issue, and may not be Articulate specific. This was the only reference I could find online to this issue, but the issue is also odd in that it may take some a/b testing of compression tools to even see what's happening (it would have been easy for me to just to blame Workday at the start, for example). 

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/folders-missing-in-downloaded-compressed-file-in/257db594-e158-4a80-b3bf-ce237ea2b76c

 

***

I have attached a sample package "Test Non Proprietary.zip". If you view or "Extract All" this using Windows you'll just see some files under "Story_Content".  If you use a tool like 7zip instead the missing folders will also be extracted. 

I also attached  "Test Non Proprietary(UnzipedWith7Zip_RezippedWithWindows).zip" which just shows that I can unzip it and then rezip the course using standard windows zipping functions and the folder is clearly visible. I wasn't sure if the period in the folder name was tripping up windows zip (if that's what Articulate uses) but that does not appear to be the case.