SharePoint Learming Management Systems (LMS)

[Tony Karrer]

One of the questions came up was what people were doing around learning management.

What LMS are people using associated with their SP content?

What are the available LMS products on top of SP? Integrated with SP?

What is the experience with these?

[Jon Folkestad]

We are looking to implement an LMS at my company and one of the main reasons I'm interested in a SharePoint based LMS is because of cost. Since we already pay for SP I'm looking to leverage that cost. We are also not interested in the huge, do everything LMS. We are looking for basic tracking capability.

does anyone have experience with any of the SP LMS vendors? I would love to hear the pros and cons of the solutions out there. Thanks -Jon

[Nick Wayne]

Hey Jon,

We (Xerceo) integrate with SP as well. There's a pdf doc on the left-hand side of our home page that outlines how we do it.

http://xerceo.com/

Best,

nick

[Darcie Opferman]

We just purchased the IntraLearn product, Learning Server. So far so good. There are demos online here: http://www.intralearn.com/demo/tutorialvideos.aspx

[Tony Karrer]

Here's what I'm seeing on this:

Operitel - advertises integration with SharePoint.

Microsoft offers a SharePoint Learning Kit - supposedly this has pretty good traction.

SharePointLMS

Also mentioned:

http://www.mindkey.com/products/hcm/performance/

http://www.nusoftsolutions.com/

http://www.intralearn.com

I also did my usual check of eLearning Learning Best Content on SharePoint LMS

I didn't find much, but just saw that Gary Woodhill used to be with Operitel - so he would be great to talk to about that solution if you are interested.

[Tom Smith]

Thanks again for a very interesting discussion last night. We try to keep our LMS (Blackboard Vista), its uses and training quite distinct from our course administrative system (SharePoint). One of the first points we always make is that BB is for teacher/student online interaction and classroom use; SharePoint is for team collaboration within staff. Having said all that, we have had issues recently with BlackBoard, and several early SP adopters are using SP as a means of online course delivery. (Because of permissions setup, they're using sub sites of their My Site to do this.) I've heard reports that collaboration using document libraries in group projects have been very successful.

[Dan Medakovic]

Hi - I just found and joined this network. Looks interesting. If anyone has questions about Operitel's integration with SharePoint I'd be happy to respond directly as I work there. I also worked at Microsoft for 8 years and feel we (operitel) has a sound approach and strategy for using SP and LMS integration to bridge the gap between formal and informal learning.

In response to someone else's question. we have looked at SP Learning Kit and other pure SP LMS solutions and do not believe that they scale well. However, they could suffice for an organiztion with very basis business rules around learning. For most corporations, I robust LMS that integrates with SP is the way to go.... leverage two best of breed platforms.

[Dan Medakovic]

For those that follow Dr. Gary Woodill, here is a white paper on SP as a multi-channel learning platform that he authored while he was CLO at Operitel. Incidentally, Gary created our LearnFlex LMS as well...

[Roger Mundell]

Since we introduced the gadgets (UdutuTeach and UdutuLearn) to add LMS functionality to Facebook (for free) last year, our biggest response has been from organizations asking us to integrate the same gadgets into their Sharepoint servers. It seems that tying the LMS into Sharepoint or their own portal is more attractive to many organizations than tying it into a public social network, although it is easy to do both simultaneously.

It certainly makes sense to take the LMS to where people go already, rather than have them navigate their way through another piece of enterprise software, but that was our argument with Facebook too. You can check out the functionality for Free in Facebook, or download the apps from http://www.udutu.com/products-udututeach-and-udutulearn.html

[Susan Burroughs]

Hi Roger,

Good to "see" you again!

I've left the consulting game for a regular position. What I am noticing is pressure from IT orgs to scale down the total number of apps they maintain. This means that to get what we want/need as learning orgs, we need to extend the tools IT already supports.

This has peaked my interest in SharePoint LMS solutions, and you know I'm a fan of anything Udutu. I'd like to hear more and maybe invite you to join a conversation with my L&D and HR systems teams.

Thanks,

Susan

[Roger Mundell]

Hi Susan,
Yes. actually that is a key driver, the fact that IT likes to support what they already know, and will therefore resist adding another application they'd need resources to support. That's why they look for products where the underlying database is one they already support, even though web services can tie just about any apps together these days. In our case the underlying database is SQL-server, and it's a .NET app.on the server, but being browser based it works on any platform for the end users.

I'd be happy to show you some more in depth if you drop me a line at [e-mail]

[Tony Karrer]

Roger and Susan - this is a common request in my experience as well. Not sure if you are suggesting that there are ways to do this across other LMS products. There's also the issue of what you can expose through SharePoint.

I'd be curious what comes of this.

[Roger Mundell]

Hi Tony,
Since Sharepoint is already handling functions such as authentication, profiling, grouping, sharing, event management etc., it really only lacks functions such as the tools to create and deploy a course, manage the learner access, save the results or SCORM data, and produce reports. So all we need to add that functionality is to be able to retrieve a unique userID from sharepoint.

I'd suspect there are several of the newer LMS's, especially those written in .NET, or using SQL-server that could readily adapt in this way although they may be reluctant to break out their functionality into separate gadgets and only sell parts of their solution.

The thing is that from an end user perspective any two apps can be made to look like a single solution through a web interface these days so long as the user ID can be exposed to a web service. So for end users sharepoint could be integrated with almost anything. It's just the IT folks who are looking for simplicity, because naturally they don't want the issues surrounding different databases, or scripting languages they don't support, etc.

Another reason is that if the data is all being stored in a database that IT supports it's easier to create new queries and reports without going back to the vendor.