As I was walking around the Expo floor yesterday, I was surprised by a LMS vendor that had some “What were they Thinking?”when it came to features in their system.

What were they Thinking?

1. On the administration side, a good LMS will enable you to either “turn on/off” labels, or you can “edit” the labels or “add” new labels. Simple to use. Easy to use. Anyone can do it.   However with these guys, if you want to change the labels on the front side for the home page for end users — You have to change it with HTML! That’s right. HTML. So your administrator, has to know HTML to make the changes for the labels, edit, remove, delete. Plus additional changes to the front side. Why do this?

Apparently, they believe that everyone has a programmer or someone in IT/IS who can do this and is available. But as a lot of us know, that isn’t the case. Our administrators do not typically 99% of the time have that skill set and unless you are a heavy tech geek and know coding, you are perhaps unlikely to know that code. Plus, is your IS/IT have someone who can handle this or has the time to do it?

2. Tech Support:  They charge for it. $2,500. Uh, excuse me? I said to the vendor, if I buy a brand new car and it breaks, why should I pay the dealership to fix it? Silence.

3. Administration Side:  They are updating it. First time in 13 years. Let me repeat this — 13 years. As I recall the projected date is “April”. They couldn’t guarantee that date, fully understandable. That said, this to me is a “Red Flag“. Why?

Red Flag

A. Waiting that many years to create a new administration back end interface design? It says to me, how fast are they to make new changes and switches going forward, especially when their reasoning made no sense for the hold back on the change. The vendor explained that their customers did not want to make the change, because it would be difficult or confusing to re-learn.

Okay, but think this way: If you are a new customer during that time frame, you wouldn’t know regarding the past. You wouldn’t care. You would want something easy to use, slick to use. So that argument, to me doesn’t hold water.

Additionally, in 13 years, many things have changed – i.e. a new slicker interface, new coding capabilities. Plus — uhh training? Train your end users on how to use the new administration side. Offer them “free training”, webinars or instructor led (during that time frame) or blended or documents – pdfs, whatever.

You have lots of choices.  Lastly, ignore the “data” spin. Making an interface change does NOT affect your data. Especially, since they — the vendor is making this interface change.  This is their job, to make sure data works within the new interface. If not, they fix the bugs.. and how do they ensure that the data is not impacted?  They used a “sand box” or “test environment” with fake data and their new interface and worked out the bugs and issues before going “live‘.

YET on a Plus or maybe Minus depending on your perspective: As part of your back end side, they give you a “live” environment, which is your LMS, a “production” or something like that — can’t recall full details, and a “test drive”, which is basically a sand box. So, in the last environment, this is where they actually test their updates, new features, maintenance, prior to putting it into the “live” environment.

Plus, you as the administrator can go into the test environment, and play around in it, test things out without damaging your live “LMS” environment. I like this.

If you are unfamiliar with the multi-environment experience, you may see this as a minus. The only Plus you would see, is the testing from them, making sure things works, before they do a maintenance update or update across all the “LMS” – i.e. live environments. So, that is a plus. Again, if they offer this — why couldn’t they have done this in the span of waiting 13 years to upgrade the interface on the administration side?

Module Advertisement and Mobile Learning

Lastly, they advertise lots of modules — nice, but they charge extra for them. Their mobile learning is cool, but it uses “proprietary” based software — their software. So you cannot create content/courses in other mobile learning tools or open source mobile learning tools be able to use it with their solution. They say they are working on a future upgrade to do this. Again, “future”.

More Notes Later..including a player who “gets” it when it comes to where “LMS’s have to go now and down the road  – social integration tied to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Skype; Plus unlimited Seats, plus Community page – photos, thoughts, plus the whole reg. features of a LMS — and other. Still has some things to work on, still has a few components to go — oh, did I say $12K? I think by late Q3, these guys are going to have a fully robust system that can do damage.  Small company, but what is nice, they “see” it, they “understand it” and “they grab” it. – future – yeah – open source, api.  Off to another seminar.