Likelihood to Recommend I feel Cornerstone OnDemand is a great solution for companies that have a large amount of compliance training that needs to be assigned and closely tracked. The features of dynamic groups (based on specific user criteria) allows you to target very specific audiences. The assignment functionality gives you great flexibility on when the assignment runs and how often, and also provides many options for due dates (static date or dynamic date - x days from hire date, date assigned, etc.). This has allowed us to have a clear and consistent user experience for both our newly hired employees and our seasoned employees.
Read full review It integrates fully with the other Microsoft software we use daily, and this coordination speeds up our work and gives us the agility to run easily. For example, in a purchase inquiry, the customer, after submitting a request, identifies the teams that should work on the project, and if they need further review by other people, they are added to the process, and everything is managed seamlessly rather than the sales process. Get the result as fast as possible.
Read full review Pros Automatic recurring assignments are easy to get that refresher training out without needing to assign it fresh each time. Reporting 2.0 makes it easy to write and share your reports with just selected filters. Making it easy for people receiving it to just change what they need to see. Learning Admin Console makes it easy to peek at what is going on in your portal and open up connected reporting when needed. Success Center is a great resource for getting peer answers to questions and learning about the releases and suggesting changes that should be added to the roadmap. Read full review Microsoft Dynamics AX's scalability to meet our regional office needs provide flexibility to the team's requirements. Combined with Citrix Xenapp, the application offers seamless access for users on high latency unreliable network connection to the application. Application maintenance and updates are easy which makes it possible for us to manage remotely considering the servers are located in a remote Asia site. Read full review Cons Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be. I would like to see more OSHA related courses. At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform. Read full review MRP can be slow to adapt to changes in actual production or supply chain transactions. Setting up number sequences seems a trivial matter, but these numbers ID transactions once they are in the ledger and are key--easy to miss this point in the implementation process. Bank rec being easily automated and able to quickly plug into a bank back end to get data is not the best. Payment processing can be 'clunky' based on checks, ACH, Wires...as some of these items are not triggered out of the box in AX, bur are easily added --talking ACH and Wires specifically. Jay Omdahl President and Principle Managing Consultant
Read full review Likelihood to Renew As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.
Jamie Drahos Learning Management System Administrator, Training Specialist
Read full review Microsoft Dynamics continues to evolve by bringing more functionality to the customer. Also there are several independent software providers that offer a wide range of solutions for vertical markets.
Read full review Usability Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)
Read full review Overall the product does what we need it to do in order for us to function as a company. While there are some concerns over ongoing costs, the belief is, once we have it fully acclimated to our business the cost should settle into alignment with our original expectations. The new features that are consistently being added do add value to the product as they are usually customer request directed.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.
Read full review Some integration and high volume ramping challenges, particularly with BizTalk and SQL Server, but getting sorted out. Outages over time appeared to be more dependent on integration complexity than AX MES.
Read full review Performance Pages do not load quickly. Often times any action or selection of a box, drop down, check, pretty much ANY Javascript interaction causes the whole entire page to load/reload/start doing something in the background. This makes a nightmare for having to mass edit courses or upload ILT sessions. It's the one of the archaic web designs they use that really bugs me as an admin and makes working in the portal at times intolerable and insufferable
Read full review Some integration and high volume ramping challenges, particularly with BizTalk and SQL Server, but getting sorted out. Outages over time appeared to be more dependent on integration complexity than AX MES.
Read full review Support Rating Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.
Read full review We use a 3rd-party Microsoft Partner for the system. They are responsive and very knowledgeable. While costs have been mentioned several times in this review they are very aware of costs and have developers who are more economical they use to help offset the level of work required to meet our changes and fix our issues.
Read full review In-Person Training we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.
Read full review It took a lot of work, but Microsoft ultimately did a good job with in-person training, including being onsite in multiple global locations for extended periods.
Read full review Online Training The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.
Read full review Our solution deviated from a number of key out-of-the-box standards that were included in Online training. We just used that for introduction to the general functionality.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted. For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point. The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting. The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things. In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves. I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories
Read full review Some rough spots, but ultimately worked out. The contract didn't appear to be structured to support the level of overlapping facility deployments required to meet timeline commitments. Merging cultures on the program was also challenging. Overall, not an easy implementation by any stretch. Everyone did the best they could.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected
Read full review I was not part of the decision making process to select Microsoft Dynamics AX, however, I do know that an exhaustive search was done and many options were considered alongside Microsoft Dynamics AX and I feel that the right decision was made in choosing this solution.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another
Read full review Scalability It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs
Read full review Professional Services As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.
Read full review Return on Investment We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this. The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings. Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting. Read full review With the robust built-in reporting we were able to drop an external reporting platform that costed about $40,000. API integrations have saved manual entry and reduced having to hire 2-3 people to manage data. Several administrators and developers are required for this which costs about 200-300 thousand in employee costs. Read full review ScreenShots Cornerstone OnDemand Screenshots