John Leh

Customer activity such as a course purchase, renewal, webinar participation, or whitepaper download should trigger relevant content recommendations or delivery. Therefore, these systems must be tightly integrated with CRM software, marketing automation and survey platforms, social media, ecommerce tools, accounting, finance, customer support and other systems.

Continuing education providers offer a broad spectrum of learning experiences -- from in-person classroom sessions, mentoring and on-the-job training to self-paced study in virtual and blended formats.

Nearly all vendors rely on integration with one or more third-party virtual online event applications such as GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect or Cisco WebEx.

Many low-cost marketing automation tools and marketing-savvy learning platforms now support specialized packaging, pre-scheduled content subscriptions, coupons, discounts, bundles, branded promotions and more.

Recognizing the futility of direct competition, specialty LMS vendors learned to focus on a particular audience, industry or other factors where they now claim competence and fight for customers in that niche.

Extended enterprise LMS stakeholders were proving that learning initiatives make a legitimate business impact by comparing trained vs. untrained audiences on metrics like sales volume, customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value.

All four categories share much of the same core functionality -- but each type is also characterized by unique functionality, use case workflows and integrations that the others don't require.

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To find the right learning platform, you need a clear understanding of your organization's current and anticipated usage, and more...

Under the hood, commercial LMSs must be tightly integrated with a full stack of robust, reliable, complementary technologies that support end-to-end business operations.