A successful organization whether it’s 100 People Company or a Global Fortune company always focuses on learning and training, because it wants to keep up with the change and competition. These organizations have fixed budgets for training every year. When we talk to our clients they say that they want a lot of training to be developed but as they are running out of budgets, they shift some of the training to the next year.

Now the big question, are these companies not focused on the training? Do they treat the training as a crucial initiative to care about?

The answer is Yes! These companies consider the training as high priority but a huge part of the budget is spent in paying for their LMS solution and the remaining is used to develop online training courses.

If your company is also facing a similar issue then here is a flexible solution for it – use an Open Source because it cuts the cost tremendously. Open source has came up as a cost effective solution as a complete elearning platform.

Recently, some of our clients who always use to say that they are running out of budgets are now giving us lot of training courses to develop only because they have shifted to Open Source LMS. Out of those clients, couple of them even asked us to host their open source LMS and maintain it on our servers as we provide Open Source services since 2005.

Open source LMS provides you the flexibility of customizing it to your requirements like:

• The theme of the LMS can be customized as per company’s branding based on corporate template.
• Open Source LMS has default features. These can be customized based on specific requirements of the company.
• Some features of the LMS may not be suited for a company. These features and functionality can be modified as per the requirement.
• Customized tracking and reports for better evaluation of training.
• The login system can be integrated with any other employee database system which the company is using (it may not be possible in some LMS’).
• Terminology of the modules name, navigation, buttons etc. can be customized to company’s requirement.

The critical part in Open Source LMS is hosting. In hosting you have two options:

Option 1: You can host LMS on your server itself provided you have technical staff who can manage the server and a programmer who can understand and maintain the LMS.

Option 2: You can hire a vendor who can take up hosting and maintenance of the LMS.

I will discuss in detail more about open source customization in my coming post.

Love to hear your views.