Nashua, NH (USA), February 2008 - SumTotal® Systems, Inc., SkillSoft, and Eedo Knowledgeware have announced they are partnering to evolve standards to meet their customers' needs, ensuring less costly integrations and richer solutions through SkillSoft's Open Learning Services Architecture (OLSA). OLSA is a web services-based, dynamic content solution for enterprise eLearning systems.
The partnership, comprised of a content provider, an LMS vendor, and an LCMS vendor (SkillSoft, SumTotal, and Eedo respectively), is working with the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC). SkillSoft has offered OLSA APIs for submission to the AICC. The submission process is still in progress.
"We were pleased that SkillSoft and Eedo responded to our request to come up with a solution to solve the problems related to the intensive integrations involved in connecting a content provider with our LMS and LCMS systems", says Rick Rabideau, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Learning Solutions for MetLife. "We anticipate that integrations using the OLSA standard will help improve the efficiency of our overall eLearning system as well as decrease development and distribution time for content."
"As a result of SumTotal's LMS support for SkillSoft's OLSA technology, our learners can access the full range of dynamic and rich content that SkillSoft is known for easily and seamlessly. Furthermore, the system administration time is drastically reduced. Across the board, benefits are felt in multiple areas of a learning department", said MaryEm Musser, Director eLearning and Education Technologies from BDO Seidman. "I now hold all of my vendors to the same level of experience on their integrations and customer service."
"SumTotal is committed to providing our customers with a world-class learning platform that can deliver content seamlessly and efficiently", says Bill Docherty, Director of Product Management at SumTotal. "We have worked in partnership with SkillSoft to deliver OLSA-based solutions to the benefit of dozens of mutual customers. SumTotal is excited to join forces with SkillSoft and other industry providers to drive adoption of this standard."
"Eedo is supporting OLSA as a standard because we heard our customers complaining about integration issues", says John Hudson, president and CEO of Eedo Knowledgeware. "Any movement towards standardizing on web services is a step forward for our customers. As many LMS vendors will be supporting OLSA as a standard to make SkillSoft content interoperable with their LMS systems, it made sense to make the integration of our ForceTen LCMS interoperate as well."
If you want to learn more about how leading content and LMS vendors EEDO and SumTotal are using standards-based SkillSoft Open Learning Services to offer richer learning content and related services to customers, join the webinar on 5 March 2008.
