Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
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SilkRoad Learning
Score 7.7 out of 10
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SilkRoad Learning is a web-based LMS. The vendor advertises enterprise-level platform for addressing skills gaps and regulatory compliance, as well as ecommerce and mobile support. It can integrate with other SilkRoad offerings and 3rd party content.
Less good than Adobe, doesn't look as good, and less mobile/agile with fewer customizable features. Easier for people to learn how to use but slightly boring and didn't seem to be particularly popular with people. A system that is fun to use does get used more and more …
Absorb LMS has been incredibly well suited to our business needs. It is a robust platform with a wide ranges of tools, which make it easy to implement whatever training is desired. While there are many tools and options, the system itself is not overwhelming. The team we have worked with at Absorb (Jordan Wolf and Steve Ernstes) made onboarding, implementation, and continued customer support a breeze. The amount of support we received when we did encounter small issues was amazing.
It is very well suited as a web based LMS. They have excellent customer service and support. Ask about the reporting features - these are challenging in many LMS applications. The training they provided for administrators is also very good. Overall a great company, and they are constantly working to improve the product
Overall, Absorb LMS is pretty easy to use for learners and especially for admins. It's practical to create and manage course content - it provides the most crucial options and yet is lean enough not to overcomplicate the admin's life. The consistent and customizable "table-view" in most of the admin-areas is very helpful and easy to follow.
Using Enrollment Rules, Absorb LMS let you define who a course applies to and how they get enrolled. You can build rules based on learner attributes, such as department, location job role, group, to include or exclude specific audiences. The way Absorb LMS is using enrollment attributes, no other LMS actually can fulfill our requirements easier. Enrollment rules are mainly embedded in individual course options (you can also create scheduled enrollments outside of the courses).
GreenLight is very good at keeping track of employee requirements through the use of qualifications. It is the backbone of how courses, classes, requirements and activities are assigned and monitored.
The content objects (development) portion of GreenLight is robust. It allows you to mix various content objects from different sources. For instance if you import a SCORM ecourse, an AICC ecourse and want to add an HTML page as an introduction, the software will allow you to combine all seamlessly into one course. In addition, the navigation and sequencing tools offer considerable functionality.
The reporting feature of this software is very good (but not best of class). The number of standard reports is fairly extensive and cover most needs. Having the ability to output files for further analysis and manipulation in Excel takes care of a number of areas where the standard reports fall short.
The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
more education around Absorb analyze essentials
How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
'my profile' has been a little glitchy for us but we are a very small team and don't use that element much, photos don't load or stay loaded
Sometimes the main list with due dates, type of training etc. seems hard for people to completely understand some more customizable sections here would be useful for us
On the whole, is not a customizable as other platforms we've used. Is good at tracking but not so much the kind of cataloging we need.
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
Our training director has determined that the customer service and ease of use is too difficult. She intends to check into other LMS systems and end our contract with Silkroad.
The system is very flexible, allowing admins to build dashboards that offer different UX and UI for different roles. The increase in usability is great for engagement and one-click actions. In addition to the dashboards, the admin interface is intuitive and allows managers to easily access reports for their teams.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
There have been many times when the site was unavailable for a short time. Also, glitches and unexplained ed activity such as sending training notifications out to terminated employees.
We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should
My client success manager had to reach out once for our company once. Although it was not an Absorb issue (it was an issue on the course vendor side), Absorb offered a resolution while the vendor was fixing the issue. We were very happy with the resolution and feel like Absorb went above and beyond for us.
The questions regarding how to implement in the system are answered quickly and efficiently. If there is an issue with the technical side or integrations it takes forever to get results and after much escalating.
The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.
SilkRoad Learning is much easier to customize and roll out globally. The Skillsoft product was expensive, cumbersome, and required a large ramp up time. When working with clients on Skillsoft, too much had to be predetermined, the languages were not fully developed and learners had to pay each time they accessed a module and get reimbursement from the company - it was not effective.
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
The system went down/offline for 5 or 6 days in January. This is the month we have 3400 employees taking annual required training. It had several glitches afterwards that took months to correct.
We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization. Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot, with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to provide us with solutions.
We used Absorb LMS to track Annual Safety Training to ensure compliance with inspectors and ensure our teammates understand the risks and how to mitigate them safely. We were never able to track this before and thus, we simply didn't have mandatory annual training.
A huge drawback prior to implementation of Absorb LMS was our inability to offer more than our 40 purchased e-courses to our employees. These were mostly safety and equipment based courses, so we didn't have any soft skill development happening. Now we have hundreds of courses available from the Absorb library that cover the safety aspects, but we also have dozens of leadership courses, communication and influence courses, etc. It has been a huge gamechanger for our employees and their development opportunities! When I look at our course library, there are 400 courses, which over 300 being available through Absorb library (the other 80+ were made using Absorb Create).
GreenLight has provided an easy route for our users to receive training online and in-class. They can quickly and easily search and sign up for anything on the catalog. Being in healthcare, we provide a lot of training on a constant basis. GreenLight has provided a great foundation for our company to accomplish it's training needs and goals.
Employees can quickly access and complete online trainings so that they can get back to their jobs.
