LMS Review: ExpertusONE

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I’ve been anxious to get to this review of ExpertusONE with all their award-winning recently in the industry.  I couldn’t wait to see if it was hype or reality.  It’s reality.

Undeniably, ExpertusONE LMS is cool.  

No LMS vendor can invest equally in all parts of their product.  You have to pick what you want to be good at and invest more heavily in those features.

Expertus, the makers of the ExpertusONE LMS, has chosen to be good at extended enterprise learning.  Expertus wanted to build an LMS from the ground up and make it act and feel like today’s best ecommerce and social media sites.   They have.  

They are pushing the envelope in mobile, social, gamification, virtual classroom, ecommerce and integration.  In each category, they show up with deeply integrated technology that is going further than the norm.   Some examples:

• The Mobile app has “presence sensing” that automatically confirms a users attendance in an instructor-led event
• Unlike many LMSs, the social features are seamlessly integrated everywhere for all users and not just bolted onto the side of the LMS
• eCommerce features support complex global tax and VAT rules
• REST APIs, the next generation web services, make sharing any functionality or data with other systems a snap

Their website is full of client case studies, position papers, blog articles and webinars all geared towards extended enterprise and the relevant features sets.  Expertus targets actual business solutions vs. “hey look at my LMS” approach of most vendors.  

For example, they have taken the business need of channel education and looked at it from a business standpoint of improving sales readiness, engagement of partners and increasing effectiveness of channel and they present their solution through that lens.  They know that channel educators might not be from the HR community and may not have super strong LMS backgrounds, so they skip the jargon and focus on how they help clients.  Smart. 

To support this grander business focus, Expertus provides the full spectrum of professional services, to help their clients with implementation, strategy development, outsourced administration and learning analytics.  They have 13 years experience providing these solutions, so they match a good product with experienced support.

My assessment of the ExpertusONE LMS — The ExpertusONE is an outstanding extended enterprise LMS that leads the marketplace in several areas.  It easy to use, yet chock-full of features to make learning fun, engaging and contextual for the extended enterprise.  The Millennium generation will eat this up and prefer it over the old guard LMS solutions.  If you have a pure extended enterprise initiative targeted at your channel, customers or members, Expertus, most definitely, needs to be in the vendor evaluation pool.

ExpertusONE LMS Extended Enterprise Vitals

LMS Name:  ExpertusONE

Website: Expertus.com

Twitter: @ExpertusONE

Contact Information: http://www.expertus.com/contact-us/#contact-us

Extended Enterprise Ready:  Yes

Types of Extended Enterprise Expertise Learning Supported:

• Sales Channel
• Customer
• eCommerce

Differentiation:

• Enterprise class, completely cloud LMS
• Heuristic design like Google, Facebook and Amazon. (I had to look up heuristic :-)
• 13+ years of experience in LMS
• Provide a full range of learning services to ensure rapid deployment, a smooth transition from legacy systems and sustained learning success

Licensing and Certification:

• Due dates on content with status icons and progress bars
• Certifications can obtain a series of content
• Manager dashboards
• I didn’t see tracking of course credits, dynamic certifications paths (either /and /or logic), support for learning events outside of the catalog or other common advanced certification support

Adaptive Learning:

• Dynamic learning content access/assignment based on job, role and other custom audience tags (profile fields)
• Contextual sharing of content based on previous content consumption or recommendations of peers

eCommerce Features: 

• Shopping cart
• Multiple payment methods including credit card, invoice and training credits for bulk purchases
• Promotions and discounts
• Support for complex global tax policies and currencies

Virtual Classroom:  Expertus is one of very few vendors with their own proprietary, integrated virtual classroom tool that includes the following features:

• Video sharing, screen sharing
• Whiteboards, polls, collaboration
• Application and file share
• Enrollment, completion, reporting all part of core LMS feature set
• Free VoIP or integrated phone conferencing available

Social Collaboration Features:  The ExpertusONE LMS is built with social and mobile from the ground up and includes:

• Class centered discussion forums
• Chat
• Q&A
• Sharing content
• Content ratings with integration into catalog
• Content recommendation to peers
• Tagging content (new school keywords)
• Most popular content, highly rated content widgets

Mobile Features: 

• iPad and Android native apps allow offline content consumption and eventual sync back to the LMS
• Managers have dashboards, tools, reporting to streamline mundane tasks
• Mobile is integrated in the instructor-led training process by having classroom pools, social, surveys delivered during the ILT experience
• Presence Sensing allow users with the Expertus mobile app to be automatically signed into class when they enter the room
• On-the-job training support
• No responsive design was in the product but they did say it was coming (automatically re-size screen based on device size without a separate mobile app)

Gamification Features: 

• Points, badges and leaderboards to incentive collaboration, sharing and activity
• Design gamification strategies based on corporate goals
• Configurable badges, points and programs
• Ratings of content
• Integrated reporting of all of the above for users, managers and administrators

Globalization Features: 

• Localizations  ( I saw at least 5 separate language localizations in a case study, but could not find a definitive list anywhere…)
• Global currency and tax support
• Export exclusions

Technology: 

• Private cloud deployment
• ExpertusONE’s deployed on a vertically and horizontally scale-able virtualized environment
• Enterprise scalability and the high availability

Integration:

• 100+ REST APIs available and updated with every release
• Share any LMS functionality and data with other systems easily
• Does not require Expertus help to use APIs although they provide the service
• Salesforce.com integration is available to make the LMS content and features available right from within SalesForce.com providing a real life productivity step forward in the industry.  (if I had a nickel for everytime a client asked me if we had Salesforce integration…)

Reporting:

• Design wizards and drag and drop report creation
• Mobile apps for report delivery to administrators, managers
• Designed to be easy to use yet powerful eliminating the need for 3rd party reporting integration
• ExpertusONE is deployed in a private cloud so there are no performance issues for real-time reporting
• Ability to deep dive into SQL queries for modifying reports or creating custom reports

Links to Case Studies on Extended Enterprise Learning: 

• Autodesk creates a compelling, community-based channel ecosystem to educate sales partners faster, easier and more effectively than ever.
• Big Brothers and Big Sisters Ready Training for 630,000.
• Siemens Hurdles Legacy LMS Limitations with ExpertusONE’s Easy-to-use Platform — this is a nice case study about a SABA replacement LMS servicing employees, distributors and customers.

Position Papers or Videos on Extended Enterprise Learning:

• Here is a good promotional video on YouTube highlighting how ExpertusOne supports channel learning.
• The Business Value of Channel Education was found on the Expertus blog.
• Game On! How Learning Wins With Gamification was found the the Expertus blog.

Links to Online Demos of LMS:

• 3-Minute demo of ExpertusONE on YouTube
• Webinar and demo on Mobile
• Webinar and demo on REST Integrations
• Webinar and demo on Gamification
• Webinar and demo on Compliance and Analytics
• Webinar and demo on Gamification and Social Learning
• Webinar and demo on Presence Sensing
• Webinar and demo on eCommerce
• Webinar and demo on Reporting
• Webinar and demo on Learner Usability & Experience
• Webinar and demo on Administration

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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.