January Newsletter: Lets Connect

 

As January comes to an end it’s time for us to let you know what we’re up to! Our dev team is secretly working away on a number of cool integrations, some of which I can talk about. First up, an integration with Rapportive. I can personally say this one is very cool and involves admins seeing detailed contact profiles for Litmos users right inside their gmail account. Let us know if you use Rapportive as we would love to rope in some Beta testers!Then in addition to exporting reports to PDF and Excel, we will also have an export to Google Docs. While we were at it we thought it was a good opportunity to integrate with Google logins so that users can choose to sign in using a Google ID instead of creating a Litmos login. I’ve also had a sneak peek at a slick looking feature enabling learners to give star ratings to courses they are assigned to. See, I told you they were busy!

In this month’s newsletter:

  • Apple Unleashes 2 New Products – another company who are always busily getting new products out the door
  • Notable Litmos Newbies – I love it when we can talk about some of the wonderful organizations that are becoming new Litmos customers

Finally – how much do you Love Your LMS? If you have 2 minutes to spare we would really appreciate your help in writing a Litmos review!

Apple Unleashes 2 New Products

Last week’s announcement by Apple about the release of the new iBooks 2 for iPad and the iBooks Author tool definitely got the eLearning community talking! Questions like ‘Did Apple just create an LMS?’  were buzzing around and whether they are kicking iTunes U up a notch to compete in the eLearning market, rather than just sticking to their ‘distinguished colleges’ focus.

Well, I was curious too so I jumped in and started playing around with iBooks Author and there’s no doubt about it, it’s cool. I created a book (available for free its called How to get started with online learning) in less than a day and published it to the iTunes Store, and I admit I only scratched the surface of the potential applications that this authoring tool has. However, I think that LMS vendors and eLearning people can rest assured this is not an LMS. There are reporting limitations which I don’t think can be worked around, especially when I consider our own customers and how fundamental reporting functions are to their entire online program.

I’m sure Apple’s objective will be revealed in time, but for now I encourage anyone interested in writing a book to give iBooks Author a try, just because it’s fun!

Notable Litmos Newbies

Last month we had quite a few notable household brand names come on board with Litmos. In fact, Taylormade, Adidas & Ashworth Golf were some of those great names joining us at the beginning of December and they offered up this fantastic comment for our website: 

“Litmos has given our brands the platform to tell all of our product stories and train retail associates in this one-stop shop. The ease of use for the end-user as well as content uploading has given us efficiencies in training that we have been looking for.”  

Matt Nuthal – Retail Marketing Manager, TaylorMade-adidas & Ashworth Golf Company.

While I’m name-dropping 😉 I should mention we also had G4S plc – aka the world’s largest security company with operations in more than 125 countries – become a Litmos customer, which created quite a bit of buzz around the office, as you might imagine.

If you would like to send us a quote or a case study on how you are using Litmos in your organization, we’d be happy to put it up on our blog, out in this newsletter, or up in lights on our website! Just send your comment or case study to me at: nicole@litmos.com

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Well, that’s it from me for now. I’ll be at the ASTD’s Tech Knowledge conference in Las Vegas today (Wednesday, January 25th) so if you see me in the expo hall please do stop me and say hello, I’d love to chat!

@Schnicker