What always stuns me are vendors who state they know what their learners want, but in reality have no clue, because they themselves do not see the technology and its usage among the masses. E-Mail. The growing number of businesses leaving Microsoft Outlook to Internet e-mail is amazing. I see this as one of the most important features for any learning management system, open source or commercial. Innovation drives the market (regardless if it is e-learning or not). MORE

That said, there were some hiccups and from an entire vendor wise (expo here) angle, some unique and some, uh. Okay, before jumping in, I want to thank all those who attended my session, E-Learning 2020. . I can honestly say, the ATD show is changing from ILT driven (it has always been that way) to e-learning improvement. This year, I estimated a 55/60% e-learning, including some ILT vendors offering some type of e-learning component. . MORE

There is a growing list of vendors, including small/mid size that are adding talent management components that match the Big Dog systems. A couple of vendors have added HRIS modules. It is interesting to note, that many of the vendors are targeting the SMB space, especially the small size (less than 500 employees) market. What is nice is there are still a significant number of vendors who have not added it. E-Learning 24/7. MORE

How many of you have had hundreds of comments as a result of these questions, and than rather than solve it, create only more confusion? How many of you have seen vendors respond to your questions? A: Virtually every LMS vendor out there in the marketplace provides these features. Examples: E-mail notification via SMS. Congrats, you are probably looking at less than 10 (based on my LMS directory which contains 475 vendors). E-mail notification, automatic. MORE

After one quarter (for most companies) into the fiscal calendar year, it is time to see what the future holds in our space. I mean ever&# , from a senior executive at a mid to large size vendor that has been in the market for several years. Across the board, a large number of vendors (from small to large) saw increases in their quarter numbers. Especially, when vendors released their 2010 final numbers and saw big increases from the previous year. E-Learning 24/7. MORE

If you are like the thousands of other people exploring the purchase of a learning management system, the key to success is asking the right questions. . PENS was created by AICC as an alternative to SCORM 2004, 3rd edition. . For people who are working on certification, does your system provide e-mail reminders to end users whose certification is near expiration and thus they need to go into the system and complete it? E-Learning 24/7. MORE

LMS vendors are continuing to add some very unique features in an effort to set themselves apart from the competition. You don’t have to go to funkytown to see some feature sets that put the “WoW” back into learning. Built in E-mail that blocks viruses, spam plus you can send out of the LMS. Desktop sharing (appears with a few vendors). DVD to video conversion for creating courses. e-book publishing. Guess what some vendors do. MORE

In the cloud or on your own servers. Low cost systems are typically SaaS based (then again, the LMS industry as a whole is more SaaS based than hosted on your servers). Some systems in this space include e-commerce at no additional charge. The standards – curriculum paths, reports, calendar, batch uploads, assign users to one group and they see X courses, while another group sees Y courses will appear in these systems, along with the most common features in any system. MORE

Vendors in this space include Docebo, eFront, Litmos and of course Totara. My Learning tab – shows alerts, recent learning, upcoming events. Graphical progress bar – basically less text or funky icons that only the vendor knows what is – example, a recall one vendor using a floppy disk to represent an online course. Seems to focus more on client side server, when space as a whole is focused more on SaaS. My Learning. Calendar. MORE