We spend a lot of time thinking about the various permutations and combinations involved in managing a training business – sometime people say to us “but what can be so complicated about training organisations?.” It’s not a surprising comment, unless you live and breath this every day you are unlikely to see the complexity.

We thought we would give one example of just how complex this can be. For the purposes of this example we’ll be running a training course for The Three Musketeers, in this example we’ve got Huey, Duey and Louey all signed up. The registrations are all included on a single order, the tax invoice has been sent, order paid, and course instructions delivered. Read on and see what happened.

Scenario one – Huey can’t make the course but wants to transfer to another date.

LearningSource resolution :

1. Order change email sent to assigned contact on the order (the order contact) confirming the transfer of Huey
2. Transfer email sent to Huey (see in the example below how the old date is crossed out and the new date is clearly showing in red.”

Scenario two – Huey can’t make the course but wants to send Fouey in his place

LearningSource resolution:

1. Order change email sent to order contact confirming registrant change
2. Registration cancellation email sent to Huey
3. Course instructions email sent to Fouey

Scenario three – Huey cancels his registration altogether

LearningSource resolution:

1. Order change email sent to order contact confirming cancellation of one of the registrations.
2. Registration cancellation email sent to the registrant who can no longer attend.

Bonus resolution if a refund is required:

1. Press the “Mark a Refund” button
2. The refund transaction is processed automatically
3. A credit note is created and sent

As you’ll see there’s much more to training than meets the eye. Luckily it’s something we obsess about and every permutation under the sun is catered for in LearningSource!

(Warning – this might get a little bit geeky – excuse the acronyms)

One of the awesome things about Software as a Service (SaaS) is that it’s generally built with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). While this might sound a little uber geeky, it’s a really valuable thing.

APIs allow for deep integration between two different pieces of software. A great example of an API integration can be seen here.

Nick Trainor from the Organisation Development Institute wanted to have their upcoming courses visible on the front page of their own website. Their web development company Markitable New Zealand used our API to develop an upcoming course list for the front page of ODI’s website (see the left hand side of the screenshot below).

This integration was quick and easy – showing the value of SaaS generally, and APIs in particular! The great thing about APIs is that they are not custom built – as an example of this in action, Markitable are planning on using the same API to create some integrations for other customers in the coming weeks. Sometimes however, having us raving about what the LearningSource platform can do gets boring, so we interviewed Jonny Mole from Markitable to get an independent perspective on our API specifically.  Here’s some questions and answers for you to think about:

Q – What benefits does the API offer you as a web design company?
A – Having the LearningSource API allows us to more tightly integrate the LearningSource platform into sites which we develop within our chosen Content Management System (CMS).

It gives us the flexibility to include dynamic elements such as live upcoming events and course feeds from LearningSource anywhere across the client’s site, instead of having the LearningSource aspects of the site completely stand-alone, i.e. in a separate section.

From a usability perspective, it allows us to architect and implement sites without limitations in the information architecture and ensure the site is designed in a manner that is logical and intuitive for the user to navigate.

Q – What benefits does it offer your clients?
A – More opportunities to profile their upcoming courses and course catalogue  anywhere within their site, hence providing relevant calls to action that help to generate more awareness and interest in their courses.

Q – How have you found the API to use?
A – The API is set out in a logical way, which makes using it painless from a development perspective, without boundaries.

Q – How do you plan to use it in the future?
A – We look forward to the opportunity to utilise the flexibility of the LearningSource API to implement the full functionality of the platform seamlessly within the dynamic and creative websites we love to develop.

We often talk about the power of online software – the fact that we can make small changes and roll them out to customers is a wondrous thing.

Here’s another example of that in action. Talking to customers, it became apparent that people wanted a really simple notation function on orders within LearningSource – the sort of thing that would cut down the number of Post-It notes people had stuck to their monitors.

The use for this is pretty obvious, here’s an example:

• Sally wants to note that she will confirm the final list of attendees from her company by 23 June.
• John wants everyone to see that he followed up with Jessie regarding an overdue payment.  Jessie undertook to pay this by bank transfer next Wed (25 June)

We have designed it so that it’s easy to see when an order has a note against it (see below). Order notes are a simple feature but one that is already making life easy for a number of current users – the feedback on this has been great.

Some of you will have noticed that we’ve recently updated our user interface (UI) for contacts, presenters and organisations. One of the benefits of our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is that we can roll out changes to all users without worrying about version control, someone having to be onsite to install updates, or conflicts with customisations.

This new UI is an example of that put to the benefit of end users. With this change we’ve found a sweet spot that works equally well in the situation where there is minimal information about a contact, as it does when there is lots of information.

Below we’ve given a couple of examples of screenshots showing a contact with very few details, and underneath that a contact with a lot of information, you’ll see how intuitive and easy the screens are to use.

We really believe that SaaS brings huge benefits to organisations – changes as simple as our new UI show how this is the case.

We have created what we consider to be a really clever system that allows for;

• Orders containing multiple registrants
• Orders containing multiple courses
• Someone placing an order on behalf of someone else
• Course registration not being ‘confirmed’ until the order is approved

These features provide some great flexibly and in a number of cases reduce a significant amount of administration. For example, allowing multiple registrations on an order can mean that instead of needing to produce and track a single invoice for each registration, they can all be combined onto the one invoice.  

Part of supporting this is having an ‘order contact’ for each order; a person who receives all communications relating to the order.  For example, when an order is submitted, they receive the ‘tax invoice’.   The order contact also receives an ‘order approval’ email when the order is approved while the registrants each receive the ‘course instructions’

There’s a flip side to this however – when an order is for a single registrant and it is the registrant themselves who has placed the order then they can potential receive the following multiple confirmation email for the various stages of the process. People have told us this was a bit of a pain and we’ve listened and have some great news.

We’ve made some changes and now the system is clever enough to know when this situation exists and will automatically reduce email quantity.

We have also added this enhancement across other parts of the system.  For example, order cancelations.  Instead of  sending an ‘order cancelation’ and a ‘registration cancellation’, the system just sends  ‘registration cancellation’ if the person who placed the order is the registrant themselves.

This can seem complex to get your head around, but there is some really clever stuff going on.  In fact, in most cases what seam really simple is in fact only simple to the user  because  there has been a lot of thought and extra development gone in to make it that way.

We had an email the other day from a customer who was having difficulty navigating through LearningSource. It seemed the person wanted to copy the text from course A to course B but was loathe to lose the work they’d done already in course A.

Well there is a way around this and it’s easy and elegant. Modern web browsers (Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome) have a multiple tab feature – that is multiple web pages can be open simultaneously within the browser by adopting a “tabbed” approach. It’s an incredibly simple, yet incredibly useful tool. So.. how do you do it?

First of all make sure you’ve got a modern browser (honestly – to get the best out of the internet you should be running the latest version anyway). Once you’ve done that the rest is easy.

Firstly right click your mouse while hovering over the icon of the link you want to open:

Next select “Open link in new tab”:

Magically you’ll now have two tabs open – the original one with all the work you’ve entered so far, plus the new one you just selected – you can switch between the two tabs quickly and easily by clicking them.

Sometimes the simplest things can make a big difference!

A theme that we return to often on this blog is that of our Software as a Service (SaaS) model allowing us to roll out features far more rapidly and frequently than is the case with traditional installed software. A case in point was our release that enables organisations using LearningSource to schedule multi-session courses and also to add terms and conditions within course descriptions.

Our customers have told us that multi session courses are very useful because the functionality gives them a lot of flexibility when scheduling courses that are disjointed for some reasons – for example by holidays or because they have multiple sessions over differing periods of time.

Here’s a real world example of this being important – a provider may have a course that runs for 5 weeks, and has 2 modules per week, which is then split up by a two week holiday in the middle of the programme. Traditionally this would require scheduling a lot of independent courses which would take extra time and be frustrating for whoever had the fun task of data entry. With our multi session courses this can be handled by a simple dialogue box (see screenshot below)

Again it’s another example of us rolling out improvements and refinements frequently and, even more importantly,taking the burden of managing upgrades away from our customers.

We’ve got a lot more of this sort of stuff coming – be sure to check back in frequently (or even better subscribe to the blog) to keep up to date.