Articulate Storyline: A Complete Failure?

By: Justin Ferriman • May 28, 2012
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For those of you that haven’t heard, Articulate has come up with a new eLearning authoring tool called Storyline.  So far all features look promising, but there is one thing that could ruin this program completely, at least in my opinion, before it even gets out of the gate.

Rather than describe what Articulate Storyline does, let me just cut to the chase:  if Articulate Storyline doesn’t “play nice” with Adobe Captivate then it’s a failure.

Let me explain.

In every consulting gig that I have been apart of, the client always (yes, always) wants Adobe Captivate as part of their online learning strategy.  Be it Adobe’s solid positioning in this space or some other factor, large Fortune 1000 companies think that Captivate is the be all, end all for interactive training.

Any opinion as to which is better really matters little in this case.  The client demands Captivate, so Captivate they get.  However, in many cases I have also made the argument for Articulate Studio given the ease-of-use ability, and it allows my international development teams to easily share course content without strange file errors (that I unfortunately have gotten from Captivate in the past).

So the end result?

I record software simulations in Captivate and present content/process information in Articulate.  As of today, I have launched Captivate from Articulate Studio via a dynamic web-object… Which isn’t all that seamless but I guess it works.  With this strategy, both sides win: client gets Captivate, I get the ease of use from Articulate.

As I understand it, the new Articulate Storyline has some Captivate-like features built-in.  Apparently you can record the screen just like Adobe Captivate.  Thing is, it isn’t Adobe Captivate.

The feature itself might be pretty good (I have yet to test it but it is on my “to-do” list), but at this point “Articulate Storyline” is not the industry standard for screen capture training. Until that becomes the case, then Articulate Storyline needs to seamlessly integrate with Captivate – better than the standard Articulate Studio.

Not because I want it to, but because companies all over the world demand it.

If Articulate didn’t improve the integration, then that would be a shame since they are neglecting a huge part of their business (I’m sure I’m not the only one who has tried to integrate the two programs).  I’ll admit that I need to take a deeper look into the features of this program – but I can tell you that if it doesn’t work well with Captivate, it’s a failure in my eyes – just another mediocre eLearning product.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter