Your LMS: Integrated App? or Stand Alone System?

As more small businesses attempt to expand market share via social learning and YouTube, it’s likely we’ll see more sell their customized content.  Fast forward to some time in the future: Joe the Plumber has a thriving business but wants to expand. Why not sell 2-buck-2 min how-to interactives allowing people to practice fixing a leak (or other basics) to gain a following, build confidence, trust and ultimately…customers.

So how will these businesses administer their pay-for-view learning revenue streams? Buying a complicated downloaded LMS software?

And… another  perspective:  What cloud-based LMS product is capturing the attention of CLOs in mid-sized to large organizations? Or is the general trend to stick with server-side, fire-walled systems?  These questions and more are driving me to research this area. This is the first of what I hope to be several posts on this topic. Look for interviews with providers as well as CLO’s and other learning leaders.

Recently I had a chance to interview Tim Seager, CEO and founder of a learning management system company called Xerceo, maker of Feathercap LMS.  

MA: For those who don’t know you or Feathercap, can you briefly share your story and how Feathercap came into being?
Tim: Five years ago, we started a Learning management system company with a very basic SCORM 2004 course player and a lot of big ideas. The course player didn’t do much besides basic reporting and tracking but it was simple to use and customers really liked it. But we wanted to enable everyone; admins, managers and the learners themselves to create and distribute their own learning content. Most LMSs at the time took a top-down approach to training; only the admins decided what a learner would take. The idea of learners creating and picking learning wasn’t popular amongst the HR community, but we thought our “bottom-up” approach to learning would catch on. At the time we were pushed to add more and more features as well as complex integrations. We had success but we had many complex deployments and customizations that made us realize if we didn’t simplify our approach to development and feature enhancements, we would be boiling the ocean of LMS features. As a result two years ago we decided to adopt two main principles for building and maintaining our products:

1) Any customizations had to be useful and be applied to every customer.
2) Make sure everyone can use it without needing training. If it’s not obvious make it so.

MA:  I’m intrigued by your product because of the social networking aspects. Social networking is a feature that could potentially move the LMS from standalone system to an integrated building block within the enterprise. How would Feathercap be an integrated building block? And…why would anyone socialize on an LMS when there is SharePoint, WordPress and other platforms? (See B.J. Schone’s great article  for more context) 
Tim: We see Feathercap and other best of breed solutions used together to solve problems and provide a learning service to platforms like SharePoint, Facebook and others. We don’t want to replace the Facebook “Wall” or SharePoint experience, we want to be excellent at learning delivery, tracking and to tie-in to others so users get the best of all worlds. Just as companies like Zynga have gained huge success by being a game service for Facebook and MySpace users, we are seeing this trend start to emerge in the enterprise / business environment as well. Integration/ API and web service / Web 2.0 single-sign-in standards are enabling this.

MA: How does Feathercap features enable talent management / development?
Tim: We’ve focused purely on LMS/ courseware delivery and tracking right now.

MA: Does Feathercap integrate with SharePoint? How?
Tim: We tie-in to Microsoft AD FS as well as have an API connector from our CMS (we use Apache Jackrabbit) to SharePoint. In this way learners have a single-sign-on experience while also being able to pull content from SharePoint. We then wrap any content we see in SCORM for our LMS to track. Right now to do this we have to locally deploy Feathercap LMS. A goal is to enable remote access from our cloud to the customer’s local SharePoint deployment.

MA: What trends to you see in the LMS industry?
Tim: Many people have been very unhappy with their LMS for a long time. We’ve of course seen the adoption of a social LMS, essentially combining the chat, discussion and Facebook like features with an LMS grow in a big way. We see many LMSs trying to do this, but doing this takes them out of their comfort zone and starts a feature creep path which may be hard to sustain. Building yet another walled garden that is a clone of Linkedin or Facebook may be hard to sustain along with their own LMS offering. Those that take a “best of breed” approach seem to us the most likely to succeed. Vendors that stick to what they do well and make sure their systems play well with other social tools, SharePoint and other CMSs and HR systems seems like a good bet.

MA: What’s next for Feathercap?
Tim: Our next goal is to make learning available via Apple iPad, iphone and android devices. Offering HTML5 learning content as well as Flash is important to get right. Eventually, we would like to expand our functionality to include talent and student portfolio management. LMS/ TMS service in a box that can be deployed on any platform: SharePoint, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.

Thanks so much Tim! Appreciate your time and insights.

What about you? Are you using a learning management cloud-based “app” or learning management client-based “system”? Why? Why not? When do you see moving to an LMS if at all? How do you think about your LMS? Does it have to do it all? Or…does it simply have to play nice with other best-in-breed systems?



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