Should You Cancel Articulate Storyline?

You’ve seen the posts. People cancelling Articulate Storyline and calling it a strategy.

It isn’t one.

Storyline isn’t L&D. It’s not elearning. It’s one part of Articulate 360. One tool, and only one part of it. If your complete strategy was based on Storyline, the subscription was never the problem.

One tool, and only one part of how an L&D team might create and deliver learning.

On cost. We’re talking about software that costs under $2,000 a year. In software and L&D people don’t agree on much, but a relatively small software saving doesn’t suddenly give you a better learning strategy.

Cancelling a tool isn’t an L&D strategy

Nobody switches off SEO and calls it a marketing strategy.

You run paid, organic, content and other channels together. Some quarters you go heavier on one and ease off another. You test. You measure. You change the mix.

L&D should be no different.

So if your strategy this quarter is cancelling a tool, don’t be surprised when nothing much has changed six months later.

You didn’t change your strategy.

You cancelled a subscription.

What happens to your courses when you cancel?

So what do you do if you cancel? You still need a solution.

For freelance developers, that’s rarely an issue. What we’re seeing is that the decision is usually based on them no longer providing Storyline work, or no longer working in Storyline at all.

For a corporate or enterprise organisation, the decision isn’t that simple. The likelihood is that you’re locked into the ecosystem, especially if you already have Rise courses. So you have to ask what you’re going to do with those Rise courses. They’re published and they’re in your system, but if you ever want to change anything, you’ll need at least one licence to manage them. You’ll also need a strategy that gets those Rise courses into one place. That’s massively overlooked when a subscription is cancelled, and it’s why cancelling isn’t really a strategy.

That’s a criticism often aimed at Articulate and the 360 ecosystem. But a lot of SaaS tools and platforms work in a very similar way, and you’ll have to do something with your files. With Creative Cloud, for example, you can download your files and there’s an actual physical file you can keep, but you’re still locked into their file system and file structure. So it’s not unusual.

Cancelling software is rarely as simple as switching it off and stopping. There’s always work to be done in the background, and that’s the strategic part you need to plan. What are you going to do about updates to existing courses? If you’re an enterprise customer, that’s a piece you need to think about. You might go down to one licence, but that might not work for you.

The other thing to think about is where your data is hosted.

Know where your data is hosted

Articulate has two data centres, one in Europe and one in America. If you’ve got licences in both and your content is in both, you’ll find it difficult to move content between the two licences. So you need to know where your content is.

It’s something that has affected developers, where their licence has been in Europe and they’ve wanted to move content to a client in the US. The best advice is to set up your account in the US. It’s not something that happens a lot, but it’s something you need to think about.

Audit who has your Rise files

Before you cancel, you need to know where your data is. You need a really good strategy for where your files are.

We’re talking a lot about organisations cancelling their Articulate licences. But if you’ve worked with a freelancer and they’ve cancelled their licence, and you’ve done Rise work with them, you might not see those files again. Rise is the real issue here more than anything. You want to get those files moved across, and you can. So this is an audit issue: make sure you know who has your files.

There are two different situations here. A freelancer might be cancelling, or an organisation might be moving its files. For an organisation, it might just be about file storage. You might stop using Articulate altogether and keep a licence purely for file storage. And if you ever need to edit files, you need to think about how you’ll do that. This is why you probably need an Articulate 360 licence.

If you’re reading widely, you’ll see a bit of a rush to cancel Storyline licences. Just make sure, first, that your files are in the right place, and second, that you keep something to edit them with.

Or let us look after your Rise files

If you don’t want to edit your files, or you don’t want to buy an Articulate 360 licence just to keep them, you can transfer all your files to us at Real Projects and we’ll look after your Rise files for you. We’ll keep them in our Articulate licence and make sure they’re backed up. If you need any editing done, we’ll do it for you.

That gives you two things. The editing gets done, and you don’t need to worry about whether you’ve got the resource to do it.

What a good L&D mix looks like

Here I’m looking at corporate customers, enterprises and large organisations.

A lot of these teams will use more than one tool. They might use a mix of things, with in-house development and an external development team. Sometimes it’s not practical to use more than one tool, because you’re looking at a lot of investment in training time for what it produces. But you might want different solutions for the different outputs you’re producing.

A sensible mix is authoring tools, custom build, off-the-shelf content, and other things you might produce, such as interactive PDFs, podcasts or infographics. That’s what a good mix looks like.

Some of that will go into your LMS or LXP, but it doesn’t have to. You might push it out through Slack channels or your intranet. It doesn’t always need to go through the LMS or LXP, and that’s one of the things you need to be thinking about.

Before you cancel any tool

Before you cancel any tool, there’s a piece of work to do on the implications. Do we have the files? Do we have the plans? What happens if we need to change anything? Have we got the resource, or somebody who can do it, someone like Real Projects who can help us? And how does that affect us as a team?

Then the team can decide the balance. Does it make sense to keep one licence, or do we move the files over and have a partnership with an organisation that helps us? That organisation might just store the files for us, and that capital investment can make sense, because not only do they look after the files, they might do some work for us, and it might be quicker.

So you might want to do a total cost of ownership piece, just to see whether it’s actually worth it. That’s something people don’t really look at: can we do that piece of work, then just give the files to somebody else?

Does it genuinely make sense to keep one person just doing edits, when you might decide to outsource it instead? It might not be the value you need and are looking for.

Before you cancel

Should you cancel your Articulate licence?

QUESTION 1

Do you have existing Rise or Storyline courses?

IF NO

There’s less to plan. Check the rest of your mix is right.

Yes ↓

QUESTION 2

Do you know where all your files are, including Storyline .story source files and any held by freelancers?

IF NO

Audit first, before you cancel anything.

Yes ↓

QUESTION 3

Do you know which data centre they’re in, US or EU?

IF NO

Check before you move anything.

Yes ↓

QUESTION 4

Will you need to edit or update those courses?

IF NO

You still need your files stored and backed up. Keep a licence purely for storage, or transfer them to a partner.

Yes ↓

QUESTION 5

Do you have the in-house resource to make the edits?

IF YES

Keep one Articulate 360 licence, but check the total cost of ownership. Outsourcing the edits may be better value.

IF NO

Transfer your files to a partner like Real Projects to host, back up and edit them.

Talk to us about your files

Are you measuring how often you update your content?

There’s a lot talked about metrics and measurement in L&D. But as a metric, are you actually measuring how often you update your content? Have you got something in place that says, this is how often we update what we’re doing? My guess would be probably not. But it’s something you can do, and it helps you think about the implications of cancelling a licence.

It also leads to a bigger question than whether cancelling Storyline has been worth it: whether in-house development is what you need to be doing at all.

I’ve said this before: if you’ve got a team of four people, each on, let’s say, £30,000 to £40,000, and you’re only producing one or two courses a year, you’ve got the licence cost, the computer cost and the on-costs. Is that actually a good investment for the business, and a good use of headcount? You could be buying off the shelf, buying in, or doing custom development instead.

Why trust us with your Articulate files

We can take your Rise files because we still work in Articulate 360, and we’re not going to cancel our subscription.

We’ve got experience of looking after clients’ project files. We’ve done Rise projects for the NHS, Encyclopaedia Britannica and SeeAbility, and we’ve got our own library, so we’re not going anywhere soon.

How it works

There are two things here. First, you’ve got a backup of your files. Second, if you’ve got a problem and you don’t have the resource, we can edit your project for you. And if you want the project files back, we can send them back to you, so that’s really easy.

We can also keep and back up your Storyline .story files if you’re struggling with them.

Our Articulate 360 licence is in the US data centre, so we can take Rise files from accounts hosted in the US.

If your files are in the EU data centre, we’ll speak to you and work out a workaround to get your courses over. We might set up an Articulate 360 account in the EU data centre to get your files across, especially if we have other clients doing the same. If it’s a small project, we might rebuild the courses for you, which can also be an opportunity to do additional work like improving accessibility or updating the course.

Speak to us and we can keep the files for you and look after them, whether it’s a one-off or ongoing support.