We have just secured a significant investment – now it’s time to grow the team. We are currently looking for;
It is a unique opportunity to be part of a dynamic business at the forefront of web technology, so if you think you have what it takes, go ahead and apply. We would love to hear from you.
As life and business get busier, more and more people are relying on their digital calendars to make sure they keep to their schedule – there are many different calendaring applications from Google, Microsoft and others but luckily for you and us, most of them support the standard format for calendar entries, iCal.
Using this format we have recently introduced functionality whereby a file is attached to course instruction emails. This file is an iCal appointment and this means users can have the appointment appear directly in their calendar application of choice, be it Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Entourage, or any other program that supports iCal appointments.
As a standard feature, the calendar appointments include a reminder 24 hours before the course start. A really useful feature is that if the course owner changes details of a course, such as the date, location, or room, LearningSource will give them the option to send email updates to all involved. These emails will also include a calendar appointment update. When recipients open and accept the change the original appointment will be updated with the new information.
We have got full instructions about this functionality on our support page and below are some images showing how this works. The great thing about this is that these reminders will also show on mobile phones that have calendar integration, meaning those missed appointments will be (notwithstanding car breakdowns and domestic incidents) a thing of the past.
Since we started LearningSource, our aim has always been to build an international business. Partly because the cost of developing a robust software platform demands a broader market than just new Zealand but mainly because we genuinely believe our products fills a void that organisations across the globe are asking for.
As part of our global roll out, we’re excited to introduce our business development manager for Australia, Ruth McDavitt. Ruth has vast experience with business development having spent many years working for a number of economic development agencies. More importantly for LearnignSource, she’s had a deep involvement with training delivery and so has an awareness of the needs of training providers.
Ruth will initially be focusing on Sydney, and specifically looking at the needs of private training organisations as well as Government agencies. In the initial stages she’ll be making contact with training providers and inviting them to participate in one of our regular webinars or to go ahead and sign-up to our free trial. In the near future Ruth will be visiting with training providers in Australia to get a deeper understanding of their specific needs and show them how LearningSource can meet their requirements.
We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome Ruth to LearningSource, she can be contact directly here.
We are gearing up to rollout a range of face-to-face and live online presentations for customers and partners. To promote and coordinate the activity, we have just launched a new area of our website – LearningSource Presentations.
We are using LearningSource to manage this new area of our website and taking advantage of our recently launched Live Online course feature to deliver the online presentations.
The presentations are proving to be a great success. We have found that what we achieve in one online session would normally take days to organise and, when delivered face to face would incur extensive travel and accommodation costs. As an example, we recently ran a session in which we had participants from Blenheim, Tauranga, and Auckland. The travel and time taken to deliver the same presentation in person would have been extensive.
We are keen to show off our new online presentation functionality, so sign up for one of our free upcoming sessions;
It’s always nice to tell stories that show of the speed and responsiveness that software as a service brings. It’s doubly nice when the story highlights our own responsiveness as an organisation. A few weeks ago, Emma Mortimer from Business Training Marlborough gave us a call.
BTM is a new training organisation that offers training in costing & pricing, writing a marketing plan, essential sales skills and small business survival tactics, among other things. They’d looked at 20 software products in a search for something that would let them run their training management – they’re a small organisation so they wanted something economically priced, quick to implement and simple to use.
BTM didn’t have their own website and so they were looking at a complete design and build solution that was looking to cost them in excess of $15,000, take months to implement and require completely manual processing of course enrolment and the like.
Luckily for them however, another training provider pointed them in our direction. Little more than a couple of weeks later, LearningSource was able to provide BTM a solution that, within a budget less than a fifth of what they were initially looking at, gave them a full website plus automated registration – thus saving them both in development cost, but more importantly giving them efficiency gains going forwards. This was achieved by using one of the standard LearningSource website templates – allowing for a sub three week time frame from initial contact to go-live.
Emma explained to us that some of the simple things are the most beneficial for them; In the past they would write custom word documents for course enrolment confirmation. These would then be exported as a pdf and emailed to the attendee. Now with LearningSource the entire process is automated.
Emma also told of an experience she had the other night. She was at home and noticed that a course place became available due to a cancellation. Having access via the internet she was able to assess that there was someone on a waiting list for the course, confirm their place and send them enrolment confirmation – all in only a few minutes and with a few mouse clicks.
I’ve just spent a week in the USA at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Without wanting to get evangelical about this, and with apologies to those who already know this, Enterprise 2.0 is all about finding new ways to work with business – ways that increase collaboration, enable sharing and, above all, strive to drive efficiencies within an organisation. Enterprise 2.0 is, in a nutshell, held up to be one of the legs upon which saving business in these troubled times stands.
At the conference there were a vast selection of sessions and a large number of software companies exhibiting. These companies covered a range of services but I was somewhat dismayed to find that many of them didn’t have an obvious value proposition – an easily understood one line statement that tells prospective customers exactly what benefit they’d derive from the product.
I’m pleased with my involvement with LearningSource specifically because it doesn’t suffer this problem – in discussions with the team at LearningSource the mantra is always about making a difference for the customer – in business speak “driving efficiencies and adding value” to what they do.
For those people outside of the software space this seems a "no brainer” – what sort of business would try and sell a product where the value wasn’t obvious? Sadly it’s much more common than many people would think.
Anyway – those are some thoughts from me. Value is a common feature of posts here and we’ll write more about this in future posts. We’re proud of what we can do for training organisations and invite you to take LearningSource for a spin to see what it’ll do for you.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been running sessions in both Auckland and Wellington showing organisations how LearningSource’s platform can be the starting point from which they can inject innovation into their business.
We have had great turnouts and from a really broad cross section of industry types. That shows us just how generic the issues we’re trying to solve really are – all very positive as we go forward!
The focus of the presentation was how new technology and fresh thinking can provide organisations ways to reduce overheads, add value to their current services, and extend their reach. Innovations covered within the presentation included;
Access the presentation by clicking on the image below. If you have any questions we’d really welcome your contact.
We just received notification that LearningSource has been accepted into the Microsoft BizSpark programme. Microsoft introduced the BizSpark programme in an effort to give new start-up businesses access to their software resource, but more importantly, to give high-potential businesses an introduction into the network of business partners that Microsoft has.
In Microsoft’s own words;
BizSpark is an innovative new program that unites Startups with entrepreneurial and technology resources in a global community with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new generation of high-potential Startups.
So why is this important, and why should current and potential LearningSource customers be pleased with this move? Well acceptance to BizSpark entails a process where both the quality of the solution, and the quality of the business itself, are assessed. As well as this to be accepted a business needs to be recommended by an existing BizSpark partner. Both of these facts together show that LearningSource has been built on a robust foundation that gives certainty both about our product and about our company – a seal of approval if you like.
We’re really pleased to have been accepted to the programme – partly because of the ability it gives us to leverage both the products and the networks that Microsoft have, but also because of what it says about us as a company. It’s yet another validation for us that both our product and our business are heading in the right direction – exciting times indeed!
LearningSource started with a simple idea, but we were inspired to deliver more.
Solve problems
Three years ago we set out to build a solution to solve a number of logistical problems associated with delivering training services. We recognised that current systems only fulfilled part of a training provider’s needs and only addressed a limited number of their problems. We knew we could develop something better.
Add Value
At about the same time we set out to build our training system, we noticed a changing trend in the way people were communicating with one another. The rapid expansion of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, meant people were interacting online like never before. Sharing their ideas through blogs, their videos on YouTube, and collating their knowledge on sites like Wikipedia.
We noticed that while some education institutions had recognised the opportunity to leverage this new trend in online communication, nearly all training organisations hadn’t. Why? The reason was simple, it was just too hard. While online collaboration systems were available, they were hard to implement and required further administration to manage. This put them out of reach for most training organisations. Those that had implemented them found that the additional overhead in management meant it was uneconomic to integrate them into short courses.
This left us with an opportunity. If we were able to leverage existing collaboration technology and integrate it into our training management system, then make it easy to use, we were onto a winning solution. A solution that didn’t just solve problems, but allowed training organisations to enhance and extend their classroom delivered courses. To add value to their existing training services.
Build Future
It has only been in the last 12 months that we identified the final key component that if integrated into our training system, would complete our system and allow us to deliver an end-to-end solution for a training business.
The missing component was a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool specifically designed for training providers, that not only integrated course information with client information, but also integrated directly with a training provider’s website, where online registrations and payments map directly with client records. The power of such a system wouldn’t just be in its ability to eliminate duplication of information and double entry of data, it would be in its ability to deliver a clearer profile of a training provider’s clients. Couple this with easy to use and effective relationship management tools and you have a system that allows a training provider to build their business for the future.
So here we are now, three years on from first conceptualising our ideas. While there is still plenty more development to go, we have a system that’s now in use and already having an impact on the way a number of training organisations run and grow their businesses.
It’s a great feeling to reach a point were we can now start to market and promote LearningSource. We look forward to sharing our journey with you now and in the future.
