• C# ASP.NET Developer
• Software Tester

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.

The MSI investment will help us extend the integration capabilities of the platform, including;

• eLearning integration
• Google Apps integration
• SalesForce integration
• GotoMeeting/GotoWebinar integration
• Xero integration
• and more

Know any great .net developers and testers? 

We are currently recruiting so if you know anyone who loves developing great software, we are keen to hear from them at careers@learningsourcehq.com.

We hope you have a great holiday over the Christmas break.  We look forward to keeping you updated on what looks like will be a very exciting year ahead for us next year.

Merry Christmas,

The LearningSource Team

In creating our calendar functionality, we have looked specifically at the features users need thinking about ways to offer deep functionality and ease of use.

LearningSource Calendars allow the user to select between day, week and month view, all on the fly. We have also integrated a great search function to avoid the long process of skipping through time periods in order to find a particular event.

With LearningSource we are continually striving to bring <or offer> the functionality that training organisations most need, but at the same time avoid cluttering their desktop with unnecessary complexity – our approach towards calendaring shows our focus on simplicity and depth – we hope you enjoy using it!

Coming up we are looking to introduce functionality that will enable organisations to filter calendars by venue, room, presenter and course – watch this space!

Creating a new report takes only a few steps – users select a report they want to create a favourite from and then, using our report options, customise the report and save it as a “Favourite”, in the same way an existing favourite report can be deleted when it is no longer required.

Changing default settings is a little different in that, rather than creating a new report within the report menu, it simply changes the default way in which a report is displayed. To change the default options, click “More options” within the report window and when you’ve finished customising simply click “Save as default” – Voila the default display settings for the report have been amended.

We have more detailed steps about how to perform these tasks over on our online help page, click here for instructions on creating a new favourite and click here for changing the default settings for a report.

• Private course feature.  Ability to create and manage a private (in-company) course.   Read online help.  View screenshot.  Key new feature
• Registration importer.  Ability to import registrations for a course from a spreadsheet, including the ability to update existing registration details (e.g. course attendance and grades after a course has run) and import historical registrations. Read online help, View screenshots
• Organisation importer ¹.  Ability to import organisations from a spreadsheet, including the ability to update existing organisation details, and to link an organisation with a Key Contact, a Parent Organisation, and an Account Manager. Read online help, View screenshots
• Faster platform and no page refresh required for new releases.  We have implemented some new changes to the underlining platform that offer both performance improvements and also remove the need for you to refresh your browser each time we upgrade your platform to clear old content.
• Company network integration (IP Based Security) ¹.  Ability to secure your course portal (website) for internal staff so they do not require a username/password.  Read online help.
• Registration section.  Ability to view list of registrations, search registrations, and mark attendance for multiple registrations at once.  View screenshots.
• New venue interface.  New venue home tab design (cleaner layout, toolbar, and notes list) and edit form.  View screenshots.
• Course website display settings.  Ability to hide a course from website lists (upcoming courses, catalogue, homepage lists), but still make it available to people who know the private URL.  Read online help.
• Tools for managing venues and rooms. Read online help.
• Course completion report.  Allows you to view the course completion status and attendance record of a group of individuals for a specific course. Read online help.

View a full list of new features within our online help.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all of the current users who continually provide feedback and recommendations which ultimately lead to these new features and enhancements.  If you haven’t already, feel free to add suggestions or vote on other existing suggestions on our user voice site or just drop us an email with your ideas.

Think for a minute of an organisation moving onto LearningSource. They may well have several thousand contact addresses and details in their system – which they’re keen to migrate over to LearningSource. This could be customer database or an employee staff database.  Changing from one system to another should not necessitate double entry of data – with our new importer users can focus on getting benefit out of LearningSource, rather than entering information into it.

The contact importer is our solution – it allows users to import their existing databases directly into LearningSource.

However, it’s going to come as no surprise that a simple import is problematic – duplicated email addresses, badly formatted data and complex relationship within organisations all make a simple import a real pain.

Which is where we come in. We’ve thought about the way users will interact with the importer and come up with some solutions to the more common problems with this sort of function:

• First, the importer automatically cleans the data. It checks for duplicate addresses and the format of content as the data is imported.
• Secondly, the importer matches a contact with an existing organisations if one is specified.  Where a record includes an organisation that is not already in the database, a new organisation will be created.
• Our importer allows the format of data to be flexible, for example a basic import can just be first and last name and email address.

Like we said – a simple task like a contact import introduces significant complexity to users – we’re trying hard to ensure that, wherever possible, users are shielded from the complexities.

Easy what to update presenters details

Another great use of the importer is that it can be used to update a number of existing contacts, all form within a spreadsheet.  For example, if you wanted to update a number of presenter’s contact details you would;

• Select Contacts from the main menu.
• Select the Presenters tab.
• Click the Export… link on the right of the list. Window will appear.
• Select  Contact Information (CSV) and press Export.  A file containing all the presenters details will be downloaded into a spreadsheet.
• Edit each presenter’s details in the spreadsheet.
• When you have finished updating the details, use the Contact Importer to import the file back into LearningSource to update the existing records.

We now have the annoying (and problematic) situations of two organisations, with two sets of employees, two sets of contact information and two sets of historical records – not ideal!

LearningSource has introduced  solution to this problem – our new merge function not only merges the information from each record, such as the phone number and address details, it also merges all associated notes, orders, and contacts from each record.

So, how do you use it? It is really easy, just by following these steps;

• In LearningSource, select Contacts from the main menu.
• Select the Organisations tab.
• In the search on the right, enter the name of the duplicate record.
  
  The results will appear in the list.

• Tick the two items in the list and press Merge.  The Merge Records window will appear.
  
• For each field, LearningSource will use data from either record if content is available.   Where both records contain data for the same field, select the record you would like to use.
  
• Press Merge Records

It really as simple as that. We have even gone one step further however and built a special view on the organisation list to view Duplicate Organisations.

Developments like this are a direct result of customer suggestions – we are always keen to hear more ideas for things we can do to make your life easier inside a training organisation – feel free to comment on this below.

To allow providers to utilise our first step in this process, email reminder, all you have to do is select the ‘Send reminders’ option in the course wizard, or for existing courses the options is within the Communication menu on the Details tab.

Watch out for more developments like this coming soon – all in our continuing aim to make life easier for our customers!

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.

During the past month we have focused a significant part of our development on building a fully featured reporting engine.  Now we have engine in place we can deliver new reports rapidly.

One of our goals was that we wanted to make the layout and the presentation of information on reports clean and easy to read.  A report heading, a simple description of what the report is presenting, a clear list of any filters applied, the date the report was run etc…. The idea is that you should be able to pick up any printed report and know exactly what is been presented.

We are now offering our reports in a number of formats – Onscreen, Printable, PDF, Excel, and CSV, to provide for all of these various use cases. The best way to see what we have done is just check it out for yourself on our demo site but to give you a taste, below are the reports we are currently supporting:

• Registrations List: List of all registrations received within a given period.
• Orders Paid: List of all orders and credit notes marked as paid
• Course Calendar: List of each individual course sessions scheduled to be delivered within a period.
• Course List: List of courses starting within a period.
• Course Registrants: List of individuals enrolled on a course.
• Attendance Register: A form to record attendance for each session of a course.

This is just the start – watch this space!