Learning Management Systems: What an IT Professional Needs to Know

As an IT professional, one of your priorities when implementing integrated solutions is to find those that leverage the hard and smart work you've already done, cost-effectively. Other priorities may be to minimize deployment time and user retraining.

So the next question is – where is the learning management system that can meet these requirements?

Today, with hundreds of LMSs to choose from, it’s valuable to understand the needs of those who are responsible for training and employee development. What you will see is that, they too share your priorities and are looking for an LMS that also meets these requirements.

When training budgets shrink…

In 2009, training budgets were down 11% from 2008 and training headcount was reduced (4% for small corporations, 8% for large).¹ Yet, the online delivery of training increased at a percentage rate significantly higher than overall training budget reductions.

Unfortunately, despite this increase in e-Learning spend, overall training budget constraints still resulted in a net decline in quantity and reach of employees who received training.

This not only impacts you as a company employee, it impacts the performance of your organization. As a leader in your organization, you can help your company by finding a learning management system solution that not only meets your IT requirements, but also is cost-effective and can leverage the other investments made in Microsoft^® technologies, specially SharePoint (2007 or 2010).

About ShareKnowledge LMS

We have some great news for you. Knowing that the best learning management system should be deployed as a standards-based, non-monolithic system, ShareKnowledgeTM LMS is an unlimited LMS that is based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. This means it’s architected to provide best-in-class interoperability and integration with your IT and business systems. It also provides great modularity, extensibility and customization options.

Integration – Your LMS should integrate with Microsoft Office and Exchange and synchronize with your HR systems, such as SAP, PeopleSoft and corporate CRM tools, automatically updating it with the most up-to-date information about your company’s organizational structure. You can deploy ShareKnowledge either on premise, online (SaaS), or through a SharePoint hosting partner.

Leverage existing server architecture and systems – Take advantage of your Active Directory policies and standards and use your established authentication and security processes. Use your existing IT Systems Framework to provide your LMS a common ground for interoperability standards, availability and operations.

Affordability – Most LMSs are either very expensive or offer limited features, functionality, and customizability. With ShareKnowledge, you can not only lower LMS costs significantly overall – through acquisition, maintenance and per-employee costs – you can help your company launch the much needed training programs through the lower cost e-Learning solution.

There are many other benefits to choosing ShareKnowledge LMS beyond these. Learn why we choseSharePointas a platform for our LMS and howShareKnowledge integrateswith your systems.

References

1. Karen O'Leonard. Bersin & Associates. The Corporate Learning Factbook^® 2010.