Content outlives the tool that made it

Plan for the day the authoring licence lapses.

A published package will run for many years. The project file that produced it is readable only by the tool that produced it, at roughly the version that produced it, on a licence somebody keeps paying for. Those two facts diverge slowly and then matter all at once, usually when a small correction is needed to a course that is otherwise fine.

The organisations that get caught are not careless ones. They are ones where the training team changed tools for good reasons, or where a licence was consolidated, or where a contractor built the material and the source stayed with the contractor. In each case there is a working package that cannot be edited, and the options reduce to rebuilding from nothing.

Two habits reduce the exposure a great deal. Keep the source files, in the organisation's own storage rather than the tool's cloud, with a note of the tool and version that produced them. And keep the underlying material, the script, the images, the assessment items, separately from the built course, because that is the part that is expensive to recreate and the part that is genuinely yours.

The built package is the deliverable. The source is the asset. Organisations routinely archive the first carefully and lose the second without noticing.

The related exposure is content held only in a vendor's cloud. Where the authoring tool stores projects on the supplier's infrastructure and the published output is delivered from the same place, an organisation that stops paying loses both the ability to edit and, in some arrangements, the ability to deliver. That may be an acceptable arrangement, and it should be an understood one rather than a discovery, because the point at which it is discovered is always the point of least leverage.