What I like about conferences is the ability to see the latest products and hear the pitches from the vendors. Regardless, you need to have your product out and showing. Demonstrations or Live Product – The majority show you the actual product and let you test drive it. their own sales folks) and type of product they are pitching. Vendors who do not have anyone in their booth, during expo times – I see this at all shows, regardless of the product or market; but at e-learning/training shows you see it a lot OR you see them eating in their booth. MORE >>

Most of the time (as is the case with Oracle) these are different products. know the folks from CornerStone and their product does some really interesting things. For the past several years during selection I've found that they trail Saba and SumTotal on needed capabilities and they were hard to use for particular tasks that were important to the clients involved. As these systems catch up, this will make the market really hard for Saba and SumTotal. Over the past few years, they've been able to fend of Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP through superior products. MORE >>

On Creating Passionate Users they had a great picture that captures how many of us feel about LMS products: As the number of features increases our satisfaction level begins to go down because of the complexity of getting it to work for us. It forces the CMS products to seek ever higher features to continue to differentiate - a vicious cycle. If you look at what's going on at Saba, SumTotal or any of the major players, they are adding features and major functional areas at an amazing pace. There are definitely some low-end LMS products that are easy to get up and going. MORE >>

I must confess it is now four months since I received an in-depth demonstration from the people at Saba of their People Systems Suites. First off, it’s worth noting that Saba does not seem to have been suffering like so many of its competitors through the downturn: It gained 113 new customers in 2010, which was a record year. What interested me was the extent to which Saba has been remodelling its applications to reflect a very different view of what ‘people systems’ could consist of in the years to come. So what are Saba up to with their latest software? MORE >>

This was accomplished using Bupa’s Saba Centra virtual classroom platform. Bupa Live acts as a valuable repository for more informal learning resources, but direct links can easily be made to Bupa Learn, the Saba-based LMS. Production values play second fiddle to simplicity and effectiveness. In this next profile, extracted from The New Learning Architect , we see another fine example of how a learning and development department has been able to break free from the confines of the face-to-face course to provide support for learning across multiple contexts. MORE >>