What Do You Say To an LMS Vendor Who Claims To Support a Tool?

The short answer: Show Me!

The long answer: As with any change to your training solutions, you should perform an appropriate amount of due diligence before taking a Learning Management System (LMS) vendor at their word when they claim support for a tool or standard.  I find that often when the LMS vendors say they support a specific tool, what they mean is that they support only the most basic functionality of the tool. Because of this when you look at a tool and see functionality that you want to leverage with your LMS, be sure to validate that specific functionality is supported. 

You need to think about the LMS vendor’s motivation.  They want to include as many bells and whistles to help convince a customer to sign a multi-year contract with the least amount of effort.  This means they will support many different tools, but also that the depth that their support may not be as extensive as you would like.  I see two main reasons for this behaviour:

1. Many LMS vendors in the course of business will add custom functionality based upon the needs of one client.  Vendors will often re-use a customization that one client required and fold it into their base systems. This is great if you happen to use the tool in the same way as the previous client, but if you don’t, you may be in for a rough and expensive ride extending the system to meet your own requirements.
2. The other reason I see is that a vendor can be driven by a general industry requirement to support a tool or standard.  They know that if they don’t say they support it, it will be a hurdle to getting new business.  What this often means is that they will implement the minimum functionality to be able to truthfully claim they are compliant with the standard or support the tool, but will not support anything beyond the very basic requirements.  I have seen this often with eLearning standards.  For example ask any SCORM 2004 compliant LMS vendor what standard reports they include for displaying the SCORM interactions data for a course.  The SCORM 2004 standard requires the LMS to support storing this information, but it does not require the ability to report on it.  There are many tools that record this question-response information (Articulate Presenter and Adobe Presenter to name two), but many Learning Management Systems would require a custom report to display this information.  This has a predictable impact on time and budget for clients who need ready access to this data for crucial ROI and business intelligence reasons. 
   

Because of this potential gap between a client’s needs and the level of support the vendor may provide, It is essential to verify that the system can completely fulfill not just some but all of your requirement.