I’ve been anxious to get to this review of ExpertusONE with all their award winning recently in the industry.  I couldn’t wait to see if it was hype or reality.  It’s reality. Undeniably, the ExpertusONE LMS is cool.   No LMS vendor can invest equally in all parts of their product.  You have to pick what you want to be good at and invest more heavily in those features. Expertus, the makers of the ExpertusONE LMS, has chosen to be good at extended enterprise.  Expertus wanted to build a LMS from the ground up and make it act and feel like today’s best ecommerce and social media sites.   They have.   They are pushing the envelop in mobile, social, gamification, virtual classroom, eCommerce and  integration.  In each category, they show up with deeply integrated technology that is going further than the norm.   Some examples: The Mobile app has "presence sensing" that automatically confirms a users attendance in an instructor led event Unlike many LMSs, the social features are seamlessly integrated everywhere for all users and not just bolted onto the side of the LMS eCommerce features support complex global tax and VAT rules REST APIs, the next generation web services, [...] The post LMS Reviews: ExpertusONE appeared first on Talented Learning.

You’re welcome.  I just read through eLogic Learning’s 1041 page eSSential v9.2 User Manual so you wouldn’t have to.  The upside — I now know this system. Let me tell you about it. Founded in 2001, eLogic Learning is a mature and proven industry leader in strategy, design and implementation of training and development products and services.   eLogic Learning makes the eSSential LMS.  They also provide mLearning, eLearning, gamification, video and animation custom content development services.  With the full package of LMS product and services,  they are able to provide complete impactful solutions -not just technology — to their customers. Essential sums up eSSential.  This is a traditional LMS in terms of deep, configurable administrative capabilities.  You can do a lot of heavy LMS lifting with extreme user, organization, notification, eLearning, certification, instructor led and order management.   The front end user experience looks like what you would expect.  You can access the catalog, your transcript and your mandatory or purchased learning.  Organizations can brand the LMS so that it  mimics an organization’s existing colors, logos, layout and fonts.  They have a nice Dynamic Content Page Management feature that allows you to tailor the front end on a portal basis so that you can [...] The post LMS Reviews: eLogic Learning’s eSSential LMS appeared first on Talented Learning.

All vendors and former vendors know Cornerstone OnDemand. Winning 100+ deals a quarter, they make every competing vendor shake and quake.  They have feet on the street everywhere. They have solutions for every industry, every language, every company size and every business problem.   Actually, vendors, you all should just go home and stop playing.  Cornerstone, you win. I joke…but only a little. For all of you non-vendors, Cornerstone OnDemand is a leading global provider of a comprehensive learning and talent management solution delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The talent management solution consists of recruiting, learning, performance, social, compensation and succession modules.  Cornerstone currently empowers over 14 million users across 191 countries and in 41 languages. They are one of the only talent providers, if not the only,  that has never taken their eye off the extended enterprise LMS market. Having lost so many times to Cornerstone over the years, I thought it was only fair that I spend double the time on this review, find some holes and restore some modicum of competition to the industry.  What I found, was a great extended enterprise LMS and company I remembered competing against.   Cornerstone supports extended enterprise initiatives with deep social, certification, [...] The post LMS Reviews: Cornerstone OnDemand appeared first on Talented Learning.

One of the biggest lessons I learned while selling learning management systems (LMS) was that customers didn’t understand all the licensing options that were available to them as they entered into the buying process and as a result made poor (or no) vendor selections.  In fact, their preferred license model and true status of the budget, was almost never discussed or revealed until well into the sales process. As I became more experienced, I found that this secrecy was not intentional -many LMS buyers are overwhelmed by all the pricing approaches and pushiness of the vendors and are not familiar with their own corporate budget and purchasing process for large ticket items.  It is easier to ignore the licensing issue until you find vendors you like — usually from a functional standpoint. The smartest buyers though, always have a commanding understanding of their business model and to license and contract for their LMS or any enterprise software.  The smartest buyers also share budget and license preference information with vendors as soon as possible to use as a qualifier and then a negotiation chip. Smart buyers know their requirements, use case scenarios and business case -cold, and never get the project [...] The post The 3 Licensing Models of LMS or any Enterprise Software appeared first on Talented Learning.

What is a social LMS you may ask?  In TOPYX’s case, its a modern, cloud-based LMS with deep, usable and integrated social collaboration features  — included in the base price.  TOPYX by Interactyx is an entry level, easy to setup and maintain, internal employee and/or extended enterprise social LMS.  Their target market is global, small-to-medium sized corporations, associations and public organizations.  (Just mentally replace the Ys in TOPYX and Interactyx with an "i" and you will know how to pronounce it.)  They claim over 10,000,000 users of their social LMS. Yesterday, I wrote about the The 3 Licensing Models of LMS and TOPYX falls into the Annual License category with a twist.  They charge $22,500/year per and they don’t count users or monitor bandwidth.  This fee provides unlimited user eLearning management, social learning, mobile access, branding and reporting and a free implementation.  For additional annual fees  you can add languages, ecommerce, integrations and other premium features.  Even with all options in, it seems like a good deal for the extended enterprise where its hard to predict usage and a really good deal if you have tens of thousands or more users. They have solutions and corporate focus in 4 out of [...] The post LMS Reviews: Interactyx’s TOPYX Social LMS appeared first on Talented Learning.

It is fun doing these LMS reviews.  Sometimes I find exactly what I expect.  Other times, I end up in a very different place. Mindflash is a case of the latter.   I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this review but ended up spending more time than usual as it turned out to be a capable extended enterprise application. These folks are neither a LMS, nor a LCMS, nor an authoring tool by traditional standards.  Yet, they definitely have some features of all that are neatly tied together to provide a really easy, inexpensive, extensible, no-risk solution that is perfect for getting into customer, channel and employee eLearning. They have a monthly release of new features in their Cloud-only solution so they are the kind of company you can grow with over time if you are just getting started. Mindflash targets the many smaller organizations of fifty to a few thousand users that see value in training, invest in training, but have yet to make the leap into eLearning.   Every growing commercial organization has to take the first step into eLearning at some point — it is just too expensive and restrictive not to.   Mindflash is that first step.  Mindflash is a [...] The post LMS Reviews: Mindflash appeared first on Talented Learning.

I spent the last month, nose-to-the-grindstone, reviewing LMS solutions for extended enterprise suitability. We’ve reviewed about 25 solutions and have published 11 reviews of the best LMS solutions we found so far.  I also spent many years successfully selling high-end LMS solutions. Vendors, I’m going to tell you something you already know, I’ve always suspected and now finally confirmed- there is not a ton of functional difference between LMS vendors.  75% of the solutions I reviewed have almost identical core LMS functionality that manages content, users and reporting.  The other 25% are comprised of varying degrees of advances in ecommerce, social, mobile, compliance, globalization and integration. What that means for LMS (and TM) vendors and salespeople is that you have to work awfully hard to get competitive separation from the competition with your 25% and business savvy. It’s all too easy to get lumped in with the 75% and never have a chance of winning. I believe that if you know the "right" publicly available information about a potential client and your primary contact -before your first discovery call -you can break out of the pack and give yourself a fighting chance to win. I always wanted to be the one who stood out — early.  A 90-120 [...] The post Achieve Competitive Separation Out of the Gate — Vendor Eyes Only appeared first on Talented Learning.

Saba has been in extended enterprise solutions since the beginning of the LMS industry.  I saw my first Saba presentation 15 years ago when they presented to us at Wilson Learning on how we could support our many global clients with their LMS.  A lot has happened in our industry since then but Saba is still here and still talking extended enterprise. Yesterday we attended Saba’s webinar presented by Charles DeNault on partner, channel and customer training.  It was really good and I’ll post the link when it’s up.  It’s the first extended enterprise webinar or whitepaper by one of the large integrated talent management providers in 2014.   Very refreshing to see a refocus on this key topic along with so many real life examples proving the business case. All the TM providers have been too busy worrying about integrated talent management and have forgotten that the scale of external LMS solutions dwarf the size of internal employees solutions.  Saba hasn’t forgotten and they have some of the best customers and case studies of extended enterprise solutions in the industry. Cisco, EMC, Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut), NetApp, eTrade, H&R Block and American Red Cross are all long time extended enterprise customers delivering training to millions and [...] The post LMS Reviews: Saba Learning@Work appeared first on Talented Learning.

Today, over 10,500 learning and talent professionals from 92 countries are getting back to work, more than a little tired from this week’s ASTD 2014  learning, partying and travel. Talented Learning attended ASTD as part of the press corps and we talked to vendors every minute the exhibition floor was open.  We searched out learning technology vendors and asked every one we spoke to how their solutions impact extended enterprise learning, who they compete against and how they differentiate. Here are Talented Learning’s "Top 12″ ASTD 2014 Learning Technology Take-A-Ways: #1 — Augmented Reality Leading Innovation In Extended Enterprise Solutions Now this is cool stuff and made for the extended enterprise.  Performance support has reached a new level.  The idea is your smart phone,  tablet or Google Glass helps you identify a physical item (patient or product for example) and then automatically connects to training, support materials, 3-D animations, how to guides, social networks or experts.   Here are our favorite examples: Sumaria Networks uses augmented reality to help Avaya channel sales people and technicians to identify phone models and provide targeted performance support and training.  Check out this video of what we saw on the show floor on You Tube. Origin Learning developed [...] The post "Top 12″ ASTD 2014 Learning Technology Take-A-Ways appeared first on Talented Learning.

Social learning — hype or reality?  If you lined up the 100 greatest minds in our industry, you would get 50 opinions on either side of the argument.  You know what they say about opinions… So, what is social learning?  Social learning refers to all the informal ways people learn through observation and interaction with others then modeling learned behaviors.   This could be anything from kids learning sassy language at school to you sharing professional advice with LinkedIn groups to working one-on-one with a mentor.  I think most people would agree that the majority of everyone’s daily learning happens informally vs. sitting in a classroom. For organizations,  the question becomes, can we formalize this informal learning, get it into our LMS and capitalize on it?  Phrased like that, it seems kind of silly, but as an industry, we’ve been trying to do exactly that for over a decade. In the year 2000, most LMS systems already had collaboration centers and threaded discussion groups tied to courses or groups of users.  I’ve seen few client organizations use these original social learning features effectively.  Turns out that the overhead of managing and keeping content fresh is pretty heavy and the effort collapses under its own weight without a [...] The post Social Learning — How Social is Your LMS? appeared first on Talented Learning.