E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

I have recently started with a new company (smaller than previous) and my first task is to select an LMS solution that is affordable and that can scale as the company grows.  I have been stuck in archaic LMS deals before so i am trying to make the most informed decision.  My employee base is 250 ppl, but we will be growing soon so need to make a decision based on 500 to 1000.  I really like the simplicity of AO, but it seems to be lacking some of the features that I would like - event calendar, more customizable branding, course catalog, etc. 

I have been looking at moodlerooms, Articulate Onlne and Trivantis.  Any experience or comments are welcomed.  I know that I can modify the AO LMS, but i dont know how flexible it will be. 

One solution may be to use the AO LMS in the short run and possible migrate to something else in the future.  Any ideas??

I am in a similar position as you for a company with approx 1200 employees and we have been happily using Moodle for a few years now.  Nothing against Articulate online as Articulate usually delivers on their products.  I decided to go with Moodle for the main reason of having very little budget and having to go with something I can do on my own.  I started out by just installing Moodle on a basic web host to test it out and see what everybody was talking about and never looked back.  I actually wrote all the details of why I picked Moodle in this blog post a while back.  The biggest piece of advice I can give is to test, test, test.  Before signing any contracts make sure to test a trial version as much as possible so you fully know what you are purchasing.  Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions.  Can't speak for other LMS's but have been through a lot with Moodle and Articulate.

Have you ever heard of Moodlerooms?  They are a company that helps with the setup and customization of Moodle and offers support 24/7.  Cost is very low.  Did you use Articulate Online initially - sounds like you did.  Was the experience favorable? 

I have heard of Moodlerooms.  You should also check out Remote Learner and Kineo as they also specialize in Moodle.  I haven't used Articulate Online because I was already off to the races with Moodle before I had Articulate and saw no reason to switch from Moodle.  Good luck with your project.  It's not an easy one.

We are also searching for a new host.   Does anyone have any experience with a user friendly LMS all I need is a simple way to migrate to an LMS, track, report, offer certificates, very basic stuff. 

Have you tried Articulate Online?

We are about a month away from deploying our LMS. We looked at several and choose GeoLearning, who since have been purchased by SumTotal. That caused a bit of a delay in getting rolling, but now going well. The implementation has been very good thus far. Can't speak to performance until after we go live.

What was the pricing structure like?  i believe i talked to them

We went with Inquisiq several years back. It's less expensive than some, more expensive than others (Around $8k per server, unlimited users as I remember). It's not a really bloated app. It doesn't do analytics. It's launch track and schedule. Pretty simple. It could be better but for the number of users we have the price was right.

They have a demo version you can configure and try. 

About $20 per user per year. They are strictly SAAS, so no other hardware costs. That includes about 300 skillsoft courses which will be nice when we move to Windows 7 and Office 2010 this summer.

They quoted me $8,500 set up cost and $45/user??

That's probably about what our implementation will run. We have about 500 users, so that might make a difference.

Depending on your needs you might also consider Scorm Cloud. I think their pricing is pretty reasonable but differs from most in that it's based on course registrations not on registered users. So you could have 1000 users in the system and 100 course completions and only be charged the 100 registrations price.

Interesting model. Particularly interesting when you consider that this is a cloud based deployment model. Meaning you can easily integrate the LMS pieces into other applications. To me this is getting close to ideal, where the LMS is there but you just don't notice it as an LMS. The Rustici guys are also probably the smartest SCORM people on the planet, so the solution has that going for them

I use Scorm Cloud to test out my SCOs. You can register and test it in a limited registration / storage capacity for free.

A better description of Scorm Cloud... Not sure why their primary domain pointer doesn't link to this:

http://scorm.com/scorm-solved/scorm-cloud/

I am new to this forum but have been using a variety of LMSs over the years. I have settled on Efront as it has an excellent open source version along with affordable, scaleable paid versions. Perhaps you may like to take a look at it as an option. Hope this helps.

Ok - I have checked out SCORMCloud - very interesting concept.  The more i think about it, the more i feel that i may need to look for a company that is accustomed to working with managing CE credits/requirements.  That said, they still need to be affordable.  Any ideas?

Like Joe, we also use moodle (1.9) and I find it really good. It's pretty user friendly and it's free which is nice. But it's worthwhile finding a provider to host it for you, unless you have a great set up already, because a mate from another company has a REALLY slow Moodle site as they are hosting it off a computer on their system somewhere (no-one really knows where which is a worry!).

Moodle 2.0 is out now which is meant to be great, we're in the process of upgrading so haven't used it yet, but there are a lot of new features and it's pretty easy to use. It has the event calendar you mentioned and you can also create your own themes with branding. They also have heaps of plugins and a forum to help Moodlers (though nowhere near as good as the articulate community!). I would recommend downloading it and testing it out before you try purchasing an LMS (though I've never set it up myself so don't know how complicated it is). Good luck

I am in a similar situation and have narrowed down my options.  One question for everyone, how much hosting space were you given?  I am looking at an LMS, Emtrain, and was given 5GB in the proposal.  We only have about 130 employees but I plan on uploading a good deal of content.  Is 5 GB enough? 

Hi Patrick,

If your trainees' database is fastly growing, I would suggest JoomlaLMS as an lms solution for your company. Firstly, it's a highly flexible system, and you can easily upgrade (or downgrade if necessary) the version and the number of users. Secondly, JoomlaLMS is a low cost solution (for instance, a standard license for http://www.joomlalms.com/features/), it can be customized by your wish on a really moderate price.

I have a similar situation with the number of people and a growing company.  We ended up going with ShareKnowledge / Competentum LMS.  Its a linking LMS to SharePoint.  However I don't have much knowledge with this LMS.  Its seems to do quite a bit, but there are still some tweaking features that I would like.  Does anyone have any experience with this LMS, any ideas to better this LMS if so?