Friday, March 13, 2009

Articulating a response

On Wednesday, I posted about my struggles with Articulate Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes. And, in the interests of fair play, I would like make the following known.

The folks at Articulate Towers obviously have their finger on the pulse of social media, because there was a swift response from them in the form of an email from a team member, one Dave Moxon, with an invitation to get in touch by email, outlining the problem.

There was a prompt response to my email, and an invitation to teleconference. Yesterday at 5pm my time, I was in conference with Dave, who gave me presenter rights and got me to show him my set up and to demonstrate what went wrong.

Of course, as is always the case when you visit the doctor or get through to the helpdesk, everything worked perfectly!

What Dave did identify as a potential problem was that I was storing my Engage interaction files (.intr) and Quizmaker quizzes (.quiz) in the same folder as my published projects. This, apparently is a Bad Idea, so we created a new folder called Published Projects and did a little housekeeping.

Dave also considered the possibility that two other factors might be at play:

  1. The computer that I have been working on has four log-ins. One for each member of the family. All four of us have a space on the C: drive, but, for example, my space is known as the K: drive. The partitioning may have had a role to play in the problem, but...
  2. ... the more likely culprit appears to be the fact that we have an external hard drive onto which our computer automatically backs up every day.
The call ended with an invitation to get back in touch right away should this ever happen again.

We didn't find a definitive solution, but the point of this post is to acknowledge Articulate's alertness and engagement with their users, and their level of customer service. Wouldn't I just be a Mother Grundy if I only ever reported what went wrong?

So, going forward, I will:
  • work on my laptop instead of the shared computer
  • back up to a stick to make up for the loss of the external hard drive and auto backup facility
  • create folder hierarchies for each project before I start, and keep my Articulate files separate from my published projects.

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