sharepoint online ActivInspire Flipcharts & SharePoint (incl. Teams/OneDrive)

[itskdog]

Hi all,

 

We're a Promethean school for our IWBs, and all our staff use ActivInspire for their lesson planning, and share the flipchart for each lesson via SharePoint (migrated from old server file shares dating back to the early 2010s) or Teams (any new "Drives" people want for their department).

 

We use Cloud Drive Mapper to get SharePoint and Teams showing as old-school mapped drives, but some staff seem to prefer going through the web UI anyway (which we say is more for accessing from a personal device at home, not for use in school as much, but if that workflow is fine for them, we don't want to slow them down by forcing them to use CDM).

 

For some reason, when opening a flipchart online, we now get the option to "Open" as well as "Download". This then seems to open it like it's an empty folder in SharePoint, rather than going to the OneDrive client to open it locally as it does if you right-click then "Open in app".

 

Has anyone else run into this and solved it (if it's a configuration issue on our end), or should I try my luck and reach out to Microsoft or our third-party support to see if they have any ideas?

Edited September 26, 2025 by itskdog

[DavR]

Probably not much help, but can confirm that it's the same behaviour trying to open flipchart files using the SharePoint web UI for us, too. 

 

Open, opens it as if were a folder.

 

Open in app, opens a second instance of OneDrive that does nothing helpful.

 

Pretty much all of our lot are using CDM to open flipcharts, it's another factor in our keeping to use it, and I can't see another way of working with flipcharts that live on SharePoint.

[itskdog]

When RM deployed our new Intune/Windows 11 system, they tried to push us to do everything on Teams and use the web versions for everything, as part of the training session for staff we asked for.

 

Seems like this is a major sticking point still for us then, as we're trying to cut our subscriptions for budget reasons, so getting their Explain Everything cloud replacement doesn't work for us right now given ActivInspire comes included with the IWBs.

 

Thanks for the confirmation that it's not just our tenant at issue, at least.

[DavR]

Moving on from ActivInspire is a huge challenge. Staff have got years, sometimes decades, of material and experience on ActivInspire, and frankly, none of the web based packages I've seen come anywhere close to competing. Promethean bought out Explain Everything just a bit too late, after people had already been too underwhelmed by ClassFlow.

 

If you were starting from scratch, you'd maybe use PowerPoint or Google Slides, but I think we'll be supporting ActivInspire for a long while yet.

 

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has moved on, though!

[psydii]

Might be worth raising it via Microsoft Edu support https://aka.ms/EduSupport

[Alis_Klar]

On 01/10/2025 at 15:43, DavR said:

Moving on from ActivInspire is a huge challenge. Staff have got years, sometimes decades, of material and experience on ActivInspire, and frankly, none of the web based packages I've seen come anywhere close to competing. Promethean bought out Explain Everything just a bit too late, after people had already been too underwhelmed by ClassFlow.

 

If you were starting from scratch, you'd maybe use PowerPoint or Google Slides, but I think we'll be supporting ActivInspire for a long while yet.

 

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has moved on, though!

Wise words! 

 

So hopefully the Whiteboard application on Explain Everything will be brought up to the standard or ActivInspire.  We have 2 Google schools trapped in a trust where all the other schools make heavy use of ActivInspire.  It has been a challenge to get primary teachers off their addiction to ActivInspire.  The Google schools use Google Slides but sharing of planning between schools has not been possible from ActivInspire.  All I can suggest to them is export to PDF.

 

Think the other reason Promethean have kept ActivInspire alive is because it drives sales of ActivPanels from schools who had ActivBoards and who want to keep their licence.

 

Also ActivInspire for MacOS is buggy in my opinion as it doesn't feel like a Mac native app at all.  On windows I've had more ActivInspire files be corrupted than anything else as I don't think is recovers from crashes as well as Office apps.

 

Perhaps the .flipchart file type is a zip file and SharePoint is trying to open it as a folder.

 

Oh so the old .flp format was a zip file but the newer .flipchart is not see