Calling all LMS advocates please! I am researching what's out there in the market place right now and am really keen to hear of any systems which are working well for you, particularly those of you involved in business-to-business type training.
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Thanks for the clarification Duncan.
The LMS we use is by Willow DNA - they have a number of options available in terms of an API and how you can link a payment gateway to give people access to a course.
Worth a look anyway :)
Thanks Alison and Mike for the replies.
Sorry for the jargon, I am new to the idea of 'business to business' and assumed it was common currency. Essentially it refers to stuff where the learners are external to the organisation. My organisation works in partnership with hundreds of different organisations and our learners all sit within them. The key difference here is that the learners all pay to access the courses - so having capability within the system to manage this side of things is really important.
Alison - as you say, getting insights from system users is really useful. I managed to hook into a contact in another organisation that uses one particular system on my list and it was a hugely helpful conversation so would recommend scouring client lists of any potential suppliers and thinking about how you can get linked in to someone in one of them to understand what works well and what their bugbears are!
Mike - thanks for that link, it's new to me and looks really helpful
I'm sure you've seen or heard of these but worth sharing.
http://www.softwareadvice.com/uk/hr/learning-management-systems-com...
I'm with Alison though Duncan what are the key features you need that are aligned to business to business and how does this differ from business to customer/employer sort of thing?
What do you need it to do?
Hi Duncan,
I am in the same boat as you. I have asked one of my team members to do a mini project to help us make a decision regarding which LMS is right for us.
So far we have had 3 different LMS providers talk us through the benefits of their system. I wanted to look at one more, but we may not bother as we want to hurry up and get sorted. My team member is going to put a spreadsheet together with the properties of each system. I think that in each price range the systems are much of a muchness, and once you have decided upon your budget, then the differences are in things that you only find out through experience such as ease of use for the administrators, and follow up support from the provider - and of course all sales staff say their company offers a simple system for administrators and wonderful back up post-sales, but you only really find out after the event! Like you, it would be great to hear from system "users", to get more insight into these aspects.
If you are interested I can tell you what I have learnt so far in our search?
I have only previously used one system extensively, which was called "myLearning" - it was a brilliant system for the managers responsible for training and brilliant for individuals, but a nightmare for the system administrators, requiring multiple key strokes for any change and not remotely intuitive to use, so required extensive training. I am hoping for something far easier to use this time round.
If people ask me, I say "myLearning" is clunky and feels old-fashioned to the "back end users". On the plus side, it provides a flexible management tool which is easy to use for managers and individuals; it is very visual and runs good reports. It is multifunctional (on our site we didn't get to use all the functions, as we were divested from the company that used it a mere 6 months after having set the system up!) It is a robust system, capable of being used for a global organisation with thousands of users ie it is huge! I set it up for use on our site for about 750 users and it took me and my team 6 months. We then rolled out the training to our managers which took another couple of months.
I'm probably being thick here, but what is "business to business type training"?
Alison