Forum Discussion
What do you use for storyline file Version control tools? Git?
Hey everyone,
In our organization, we often have more than one person needing to edit a storyline file. It's becoming a version control nightmare. I thought git might work as a version control system forcing user to check out/in files when they are going to work on them. My boss thinks git would not be right for this purpose.
We are currently just using the honor system and trying to force everyone to append the current date in their file names (e.g. myfile_04022026.story), but not everyone does and it's a huge problem. We really need a tool for this instead.
How do you all manage this? What tools have you found that work well? What tools have been a disaster for this?
All advice welcome!
Thanks,
Lori
6 Replies
It's been some time since I've used git, but I think your boss is correct; it doesn't seem to be the best tool to use.
It sounds to me that your group's work processes are really part of the problem. If everyone is "needing to edit a storyline file" at any given time, it's no wonder that yoou are seeing versioning issues.
Have you tried to define specific owners for respective files/stories? At the very least, that would seem to be a good step to start with. Then you might try creating an unpublished scene in each story that contains a simple list/table:
Date Author/Writer/WorkerBee Actions Taken Version Saved As
And while the honor system may presently not be working, this sort of tracking would at least allow you to have a pretty good idea of who toggled a variable in scene X that caused scene Y to stall...
We definitely have a process issue. But there should be a way to checkin/checkout files to help the situation.
At two previous organizations, I used Box. Box created a directory on the local machine where the development file was stored. Whenever the file was Saved, the version was committed to the cloud. It also updated the local version for others on the team who had that file on their local machine.
My current organization is a Microsoft O365 shop. IT deployed SharePoint which replicates a lot of Box's functionality. The local version of the file is always the most-current, is managed through the OneDrive interface, and I can go to the cloud via the web interface to view and manage the complete version history.
Opening a file on the local machine does not automatically Check Out and lock the file, you have to check it out via the the web interface to engage Pessimistic Lock, THEN open and edit the file as usual.
Just be sure to check it back in when you're done, or you might get a nastygram. 😉
you used shareponit to engage a pessimistic lock? I've heard source control through sharepoint is horrendous and doesn't work well.
If I and my team were doing actual app development, then I'd want something a whole lot more robust than SharePoint. When I was writing ASP/VBScript which tied into a SQL back-end, then yeah, TortoiseSVN committing to Apache was the way to go. That was also better than 15 years ago.
eLearning development in Storyline is not app development. SharePoint is quite a bit better than it was 15 years ago. And good technology will not solve for poor or non-existent processes and procedures.
