Absorb LMS – Review

Absorb LMS Extended Enterprise Vitals

Blatant Media Corporation started making the Absorb LMS in 2003 and now has more than 700 global clients.  Along the way the company shifted its corporate identity to align with its flagship product.  Absorb is a modern, sleek and powerful tool.  It is geared towards smaller organizations from hundreds to tens of thousands of users.  The ease of use and great user interface are major reasons why Absorb is often selected regardless of industry.

Absorb is definitely extended enterprise ready and has many features to support external audiences.  The interface can be skinned and globalized very neatly with clients’ colors, logos, fonts, language and dynamic group functionality.  The Absorb LMS manages online learning, informal and instructor-led content, social learning, mobile learning, gamification, global deployments, ecommerce and more.

“Smart department” and “stackable filter” functionality allows you to create dynamic user groups based on any user criteria stored in the LMS including over 30 open fields in the user profile.  It tracks education units and has significant e-commerce capability.  Approximately 50% of Absorb’s customers have extended enterprise deployments.

Absorb allows customers to start with monthly or annual contracts making it very easy and economical to get going.  Absorb has one of the best and most informative blogs in the industry penned by elearning veterans Richard Nantel and Dan Medakovic.

My assessment: I like Absorb and its LMS — powerful, global and easy, with an experienced professional services team to back it up.  They are a good candidate for pure extended enterprise or combo employee/external LMS initiatives.

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LMS Name:  Absorb LMS

Website:  AbsorbLMS.com

Contact Information:  sales@absorblms.com

Extended Enterprise Ready:  Yes

Types of Extended Enterprise Supported:

• Channel Learning
• Customer Learning
• eCommerce Learning

Differentiation:

• Great design
• Easy to use
• Highly configurable

Licensing and Certification:

• Ability to group content via curriculum and bundles
• Courses can issue educational units, credits, or points
• Rest API integration  to accreditation bodies

SCREENSHOT: Swarovski Retail Academy Dashboard

e-Commerce Features:  

• Recently released a new shopping cart using Foxy Cart which supports over 85 payment gateways out of the box as well as custom tax code setup.
• Shopping cart
• Credit cards, Pay Pal, wire transfers, check and purchase orders
• Emailed receipts and notifications
• Bulk purchasing
• Enrollment keys and coupon codes
• Mobile purchasing
• Reconciliation reporting
• Organization and variable pricing for different audiences
• External catalogs
• Deep links to cart and/or catalog categories or individual courses/bundles
• Discounts
• Vouchers — Absorb has really built-out this feature.  For example, in one step you can create any number (say 400) one-time vouchers, print them and pass them out at a tradeshow.  You then have good data for reporting that helps you track program success.  Many other configurable scenarios are supported.

SCREENSHOT: BI Dashboard

Enterprise Level Reporting:  

• Really easy to use and powerful report generator
• Configurable report scheduling
• Ability to use stackable filters of 30 custom fields to tailor reports
• Fantastic high paced demo can be found here
• New Business Intelligence Reporting Module launching early in 2017.  Combination product and service to create 100% custom, branded reporting dashboards.

Social Collaboration Features:

• Billboards
• News
• Twitter Feed
• Polls
• Discussion forums at course and/or curriculum level
• Facebook API/Tile with base solution
• Powerful RESTful and SSO APIs allow for integration into just about anything like Bloomfire, Yammer, Sharepoint, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

SCREENSHOT: COX Dashboard

Mobile Features: 

• HTML 5 Responsive Design for automatic sizing based on device
• Offline Course Player for iOS

Gamification Features:  

• Contests can be created to select a configurable number of “winners” to gift card or other promotions.  For example, we will award two $100 Starbucks cards to a random two users who complete this course by x date.
• Contest Qualification Criteria can be based on specific course completions, or accumulated training points, within a contest date range.
• Use News and/or Billboards to announce content winners (part of Mercury Module)

Adaptive Learning Features:  

• Configurable “Availability Rules” for content based on any combination of standard and/or custom User Profile fields such as department, job, org, email domain, etc.
• 40 custom “open” fields in user profile can be used to track anything — and as soon as you use one, that field automatically appears to help you create custom user groups, assign content and filter reports
• Highly configurable administrative roles allow you to create and control security permissions and assign admins to users by Department(s) or Group(s)

Globalization Features: Absorb LMS is available to learners in more than 25 languages.

Technology: 

• Absorb LMS is a single, super-stable code-base that’s highly configurable, with features turned on or off as needed.
• Security and scalability are key strengths.
• SaaS-only platform.
• Designed for integrations such as Single Sign On (SSO), HR and content feeds via nightly feeds or RESTful API or Scheduled CSV file import/export for advanced integrations.

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About Talented Learning LMS Reviews

Talented Learning LMS Reviews provide initial screening of vendors for extended enterprise suitability.  Vendors share lots of information on their websites — feature lists, video demos, case studies, position papers, press releases, free trials and more.  We review and analyze all of this information to determine a vendor’s mission, assess the platform’s strengths and weaknesses, and determine how effectively it serves extended enterprise learning needs.

As always, at Talented Learning, we’re not about making sweeping predictions or judging vendors.  Instead, we document the realities of today’s LMS landscape, and how learning technology is actually adding value.  We have only one goal — to help clients find appropriate LMS vendors based on their unique business requirements.