Integrated development portal/landing page - ideas to be considered

[Marcin Skrzek]

Hi All,

 

I am currently working on desiging a platform/portal that will consolidate the variety of learning & development materials/documents/Sites available in the organisation. The current landscape in this area is highly fragmented and the idea is to provide our users with simplified, intuitive and connected experience.

 

Have any of you worked on a similar solution and can share the experience in this area? Can you recommend any external vendors in Europe who can provide expertise & assistance in this field?

 

Thank you in advance     

[Julian Staddon (@julianstaddon)]

Hi Marcin - I know what you mean; we have a similar case where we have lots of documents and resources for performance support housed in our SharePoint (2010) site. I've tried creating a page and linked pages that pull all this together and provide some context.

I think the thing we are missing is a real integrated social tool that people can also discuss/interact around the resources. We have this separately but it would make sense to have it 'in the same place' so that there is only one log-in to worry about.

I don't know your starting point but I was starting off with a product already in-use.

Best wishes

Julian     

[Paul Fenwick]

Hi Marcin,

We here at Kaplan UK have developed a Student Portal (LMS and self managed learning) and Client Portal (Reporting, Documents, Calendars, etc.) which enables this for our Kaplan Financial clients.  I'm more than happy to discuss our approach and technology choices with you if you are interested, as it sounds like you have a similar need.

Regards,

Paul Fenwick

Kaplan UK IT - Head of Client Solutions & Mobile

[Ian Gardner]

Hi Marcin,

My previous team used a Wikispace site to house documents and communication at a layer above intranets, LMS and other systems.  Worked quite well and allowed for editing and communicating to be distributed.  Simple to setup and low cost.

Alternatively, I guess the question would be if you have a tool which could do more than you currently use it for.  For example, if you have an LMS with collaboration and communication tools could you separate the 'portal' piece from the learning content?  Again, I did something in the past using a Blackboard LMS to perform what some institutions would have different systems for - portal, LMS, team sites, etc. - by using the inbuilt permission systems.

Let me know if that is any help

Ian

@iangardnergb

[Norman Lamont]

Hi

In Lloyds Banking Group we went from a single portal which provided a 'front' to the Learning Management System we had at the time and to other materials held elsewhere, to a series of portals presenting divisional curricula and competencies, again fronting the LMS.  When the user reached a title it would open either a document or a deep link to the LMS if it was a face to face course or e-learning. The portals were built in HTML by in-house developers. The advantages of that were 

• full control over look, feel and functionality
• responsiveness to business changes

However the divisional portals created a huge maintenance task as business units moved, merged or otherwise stayed fluid.  While I don't think we could have responded to that if we'd outsourced the portals the approach was doomed when the last restructure reduced the number of people with HTML skills.

In your position of course you might want an LMS - you don't say if tracking and MI are part of your requirement or just ease of access. However LMSs always tend to look like LMSs.

[Claire Dugmore]

Hi Martin, we previously used our HR system for all learning records and performance records and used Sharepoint for learning resources.  We wanted to create a better experience for our colleagues when they were interacting with learning and performance activities.  We worked with an a provider with an exisiting LMS system and created a performance suite using our exisiting performance framework.  The site also enabled us to create online resources in many different types of media including text, imagery and video learning, and we are just about to launch our social learning communities space in our site where colleagues can get involved and start discussions around learning materials.  Feedback so far from our colleagues has been really good and we are continuing to grow our offerings with a mobile platform during this year.  Take a look at The Working Manager - http://theworkingmanager.com/