Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. SumTotal (legacy)

I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.

Very good for learning and development and training of employees. For Applicant tracking, recuirement, onboarding, and enablement, I prefer SAP SuccessFactors or Skillate. I also found that the SumTotal app is not very friendly on android and crashes sometimes and it is not optimized for mobile. Hence I end up never using it.

Incentivized

• 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee.
• The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course.
• Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours.

Incentivized

• Assign complete learning plans to users so they don't have to spend time searching for courses.
• Export learner's transcripts so managers can easily see their employee's progress.
• Embed Social Media feeds that are relevant to their business.

Incentivized

• My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees.

Incentivized

• Reporting
• Mass importing of manual checks to be issued in California
• Ability to fund pay cards immediately
• Perform gross-up calculations within the payroll system automatically

Incentivized

Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact

Incentivized

I have transitioned from a position who supported the product to a position where I use the product. I continue to be impressed with the robustness of the product and how efficient it is. It is a user friendly software that can be used to navigate and accomplish tasks to meet organizational requirements.

Incentivized

Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!

I do not find SumTotal to be intuitive. I feel we need to adjust our needs to meet the functionality available in the tool.

Incentivized

We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.

Incentivized

We have our own IT support to assist in SumTotal issues, however, we have had to log in cases directly. Support is mediocre at best.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.

Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)

I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.

Incentivized

When I came to my company, they had been using a "light" LMS called Articulate. It was cheap and bare bones; i.e. not a lot of features, really just a platform to launch eLearning from and not real interface for student to utilize. When I began to overhaul the training department, this was one of the first things I changed. Articulate would only run courses built in their software, and the software was not 508 compliant. In addition, we had no ability to create learning plans, house transcripts, customize the interface, or manage the students. I made the choice to select and LMS that was a true LMS with all of the features that were critical to our clients' needs. Thus far, SumTotal has been able to support all of our needs, except one; mobile learning that is media rich

Incentivized

• We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month.
• Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down.
• The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team.

Incentivized

• Clean front-end user interface for easier course catalog management.
• Reporting has been more difficult than previous LMS.
• Audience building has more variables making it more difficult to manage.
• Slower overall client turnaround due to admin side interface.

Incentivized