LMS Review: Accord LMS

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The Accord LMS is a nice up and coming extended enterprise LMS solution.  I created an account in the demo site, attended their public webinar, scoured their website, YouTube channel, case studies and other social media sites to do this review.  I saw the core functionality that you want to see in an extended enterprise LMS.  This system is designed to support many different flavors of extended enterprise learning applications.  There is good documentation of features, easy access to demos, training videos and case studies to get a solid understanding of what the Accord LMS can do.

The Accord LMS has strong gamification, social, mobile and eCommerce features needed in today’s extended enterprise learning efforts.  They have also built out their first handful of language localizations for North American and European deployments.

From a demo standpoint on the public webinar, the solution architect first showed the core LMS, then brought in a senior executive (COO I think) to show the same LMS with gamification and social enabled.  It wasn’t an overly smooth transition, and in my experience, you only take this demo approach with newly integrated or almost released products.  I saw some social features in the demo site, but no gamification yet.  Regardless, it was cool and substantial functionality and I expect to see more of these guys in the future because of it.

My assessment — If you have an extended enterprise training initiatives with channel or customers, then you should be including the Accord LMS into the vendor mix.

Concerns — I didn’t like that they have no company information about who Accord is, who owns them or executive management anywhere on their website.  We’ll dig deeper in our upcoming in-depth review.

Accord LMS Extended Enterprise Vitals

LMS Name:  Accord LMS

Website:  AccordLMS.com

Twitter:  @AccordLMS

Contact Information:  Sales@accordlms.com

Extended Enterprise Ready:  Yes

Extended Enterprise Corporate Focus:  Yes

Types of Extended Enterprise Expertise Supported:

• Sales, Manufacturing, Franchise and Distributors Channel LMS
• Customer LMS
• eCommerce LMS

Accord LMS Differentiation:

• Simple to setup, use and maintain
• Smart and ahead of the curve with modern user interface, gamification, social and ecommerce capabilities.
• Affordable in comparison with similar solutions

eCommerce Features:  The Accord LMS has a strong eCommerce and extended enterprise feature set including:

• Supports thousands of products and unlimited orders
• All major credit cards accepted
• Support for numerous payment gateways
• Product rules and inventory management
• Recurring billing
• Shipping and handling rules
• Real-time shipping calculation FedEx, UPS, USPS
• Tax rules no matter how complex including VAT
• Discounts and coupons
• Multi-currency and Multi-lingual
• Product & Category import
• Product reviews and ratings
• Cross-sell related products
• Fully PCI compliant and secure
• Bulk user upload

Social Collaboration Features:

• Blogs, discussion groups, wikis
• Activity Stream
• Unified comments
• Relationship tracking
• Status
• Bookmarking
• Dashboards and moderation
• Friends, groups and journals

Mobile Features:  Responsive Design for automatic sizing based on device

Gamification Features:

• Leaderboards
• Badges
• Profile with progress tracking
• Administrative tools

Adaptive Learning Features: 

• The AccordLMS has some easy-to-use and configure Advanced Team Management that allows you to create new roles, rules, content access and more to target correct content and access rules to all types of users.

Globalization Features: 

• German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French Canadian, and French language localization.  You can read more about the setup and globalization features here.

Technology and Integration:  

• SaaS
• The Accord LMS is a modern SCORM compliant LMS built upon DotNetNuke (DNN) – the leading open source CMS for Microsoft .NET.
• Accord was designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate, launch and track SCORM content, any of the thousands of off-the-shelf applications that plug and play into DNN as well as other local and remote resources.
• SSO, CMS, Active Directory Integration.

Reporting:

• Reporting is basic but functional for core LMS reports though not as configurable as other tools I’ve reviewed.
• You can view a YouTube video here on Accord LMS reporting.
• Scheduled reporting, as well as personalized reports are available.
• There is no true ad-hoc reporting but rather options for export to other tools for manipulation.

Links to Case Studies in Extended Enterprise Learning: The following extended enterprise case studies were found on the AccordLMS.com website.

• eLearning Portal — eLearning Portal (ELP) helps dozens of training organizations market, sell and deliver their training online to over 100,000 students. ELP handles all the technical details so their clients can focus on building great courses and supporting their students.
• Catalyst Learning –Catalyst Learning provides the healthcare industry with proven workforce development tools. Catalyst Learning’s products have delivered education and career development training to numerous hospitals and over 10,000 entry and midlevel healthcare professionals nationwide.
• Price Associates  — Price Associates (PA) work throughout North America in all business sectors, helping executives and business owners solve problems, identify solutions, seize opportunities, enhance learning, and implement change in the areas of people, strategy, and performance.

Links to Online Demos of LMS:

There is a good amount of resources that allow you to get a good look at the Accord LMS including:

• Test drive Accord LMS ecommerce in action here and create a free account.
• Register for an upcoming public Accord LMS webinar here.
• http://www.accordlms.com/resources/video-tutorials
• https://www.youtube.com/user/AccordLMS

2014 In the News:  No press releases or articles found

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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.