Inside information - product roadmap. Andrew Lupton

E-Learning Guild will be publishing a major study on Learning Management Systems this May. This report is shaping up to be the largest vendor- neutral study on LMS ever conducted. They are contacting the Top 25 vendors (as indicated by market share responses from Guild members) and asking for answers the following questions.

ANSWER: Yes, the NetDimensions Enterprise Knowledge Platform (EKP) supports: 1) RSS feeds (inbound and outbound) at various touch-points, including on EKP user homepages, Knowledge Centers and the Career Development Center; 2) Has its own blog functionality and through its unified-view Knowledge Centers will support blog linking as a program resource; 3) Can allow users to incorporate Linked-In, Xing and other social network profiling widgets in the EKP "Know Your Colleagues" area - Xing supports OpenSearch (Linked-In does not yet support the standard) -- EKP can be set to federate search results with any standards oriented search domain; 4) NetDimensions can deep-link EKP to any wiki environment using standard connectors (with, for example, course launch APIs on specific wiki pages) and of course allows Knowledge-Center- to-wiki page linking without programming but NetDimensions also strongly recommends the Atlassian Confluence wiki environment for corporate clients because of Atlassian's enterprise- grade security handling and can deliver EKP integrated to a Confluence wiki through EKP (a) Knowledge Centers, (b) federated search functionality and (c) single- sign-on handling. 1. Does your learning management system allow access to Web 2.0 learning modalities, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking, etc? If so, which modalities do you support and what is the connection, if any, between this informal learning content and formal training content in the LMS?

ANSWER: In high-stakes, highly regulated industries summary and detailed reporting on access, understanding and time costs is always useful so yes -- but yes in certain industries only. 2. Do you see any benefit to tracking these activities via the LMS? Please elaborate.

ANSWER: Yes but within the bounds of corporate culture and IT guidelines. 3. Are your clients requesting incorporation of the Web 2.0 capabilities into your LMS? If yes, what component of this is the most pressing for your clients?

ANSWER: EKP supports peer-to-peer file and document sharing, content repository rights to every single user with access permissioning, chats (one on one and group), discussion forums, and SMS broadcast messaging and more -- EKP provides a powerful environment for group learning and development activities. 4. How does your LMS support group/cohort learning initiatives? Do you see a demand for this?

ANSWER: EKP supports all major LMS/content connection standards as well as a host of enterprise communications standards, meaning that EKP functionality can be invoked in a variety of front-end environments including 3D worlds and sophisticated sequencing/ branching exercises. EKP also includes an optional portal development toolkit that provides web services APIs for a variety of EKP resources and functionalities from within almost any browser- accessed environment. 5. Hoes does your LMS support immersive learning simulations/serious games? Do you see a demand for this?