ELEARNINGFORCE in Edgewater brings learning management to Office 365 and SharePoint. LMS365 blends with the Microsoft infrastructure and is designed to eliminate expensive integration, time-consuming development, and unwanted complexity. Learners access learning plans, courses, personal progress reports, and certificates from within the SharePoint business process.
N/A
Thought Industries
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
The Thought Industries platform enables enterprise organizations to create,
manage, distribute, monetize, and analyze their end-to-end customer education and external training initiatives. The solution addresses the
unique needs of customer education, and aims to make it easy to handle complex learning
operations at scale to empower growth. Its administrative capabilities include native tools and thirdparty integrations, businesses boost learner engagement, operationalize
processes, and…
If a customer does not have SharePoint the entry in that kind of solution is a bit harder as the use of SharePoint can be so broad. It does not mean it is not the right solution as a company can use SharePoint LMS to start with and then expand to other functions and features. I strongly recommend to use SharePoint Standard or Enterprise and forgo the "free" SharePoint version as a) SharePoint's core functions and features are greatly enhanced in these two premium versions and b) more and more SharePoint LMS functions make use of these core Standard and Enterprise features in the future, like taxonomy, user profiles, etc. In general with all project it is as well recommended to have the full buy in by upper management and that the project initiative is fully supported. Adding such a solution (SharePoint LMS or any other LMS solution) will require the team not only to have a good plan on how the requirements can be achieved from a technical point of view, but how a training program can be rolled out to an organization of 5, 500, 5.000 or 50.000. The technical deployment of SharePoint LMS is measurable (I would say between 1-4 weeks based on the complexity, scale of the environment). 1-2 weeks of training (depending on the base knowledge of SharePoint in the company and the need to add knowledge of SharePoint LMS). That's it. Technically you are ready. If needed, any custom work, integration and development work comes on top. Where customer struggle is the availability and dedication of their own teams. Course content needs to be created, how should a course look like, what are the parameters, what are top ten things needed moving a course which was taught in a class room, but now to be delivered online. Buying the licenses is one thing, getting the solution up and running form a technical point of view is another, making it YOURS is the challenge!
Thought Industries is perfect if you are trying to scale your customer education business for a growing customer base. It is more expensive than their competitors, but the price is worth it based on the product and experience. Thought Industries is likely great for smaller customers, although we are an enterprise-level customer. If you are not offering multiple modalities for your training program, Thought Industries (or any LMS for that matter) might not be the best investment.
Cannot pull a report for a course(s) to show who has not started the course
Cannot reset gamification or run specific gamification campaigns
Although SCORM compliant, SCORM courses often break or do not show as complete on the learner side even when the module is marked as complete on the back end
The few times we actually needed support generally were during major upgrades of the system and getting a quick handle on how the configuration changed were the primary reasons.
The customer support and customer success teams are really great. BUT, it is their product team that sends them into a super high rating. The product team has worked with me on several occasions to try to solve the business challenges that I have.
Throughout my career I came across many different solutions for Knowledge and Collaboration and LMS systems. This includes Lotus Notes, Documentum, Live Link, LMS solutions from Oracle, ADP, another SharePoint based solution. Many years back, with the intro of Microsoft SharePoint, I was drawn to that product and solutions based on SharePoint. SharePoint is very powerful and in it current version, 2013, it is the without a doubt the most feature rich and broad solution platform out there. SharePoint LMS is in my eyes a killer application and if a company, institution or educational entity looks to create, expand, change up their training efforts for employees, customer, partners, students, SharePoint LMS is the tool to look at. If you have SharePoint already installed, it is a must look at, period. SharePoint LMS became the tool of choice, I recommended when I was a consultant, when I worked as a Director for Learning Management Systems at a local University. I am now part of a team which not only sells, but as well consults around SharePoint LMS.
Thought Industries is better on the financial side and as far as ease of use. It is more affordable than Docebo and is more aligned to an external customer use case. Docebo and Tovuti seemed to be more for internal training. Tovuti was less expensive, but it was a little harder to use although it had more quiz features.
