SumTotal Systems launches the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0
Achieving its most important milestone of 2004, SumTotal Systems (NASDAQ: SUMT), the industry's largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced the availability of the much-anticipated SumTotal™ Enterprise Suite 7.0. The revolutionary new platform is the first major product release for the company following its formation by the merger of Click2learn and Docent in March 2004.
The hallmark of SumTotal 7.0 is its unmatched flexibility and adaptability. SumTotal 7.0 enables organisations to "mould" the platform to the specific characteristics of the business. It dynamically adapts to an organisation's changing needs, whether it be business processes, terminology and workflow, evolving organisational structures, or the personalised learning, certification and skills development needs of the individual employee. SumTotal 7.0 offers radically easier administration of learning activities, user organisations, reporting and compliance, as well as unprecedented interoperability and integration with other technology applications and infrastructures - all without the need for programming and customisation.
"After months of strategy and planning, hard work from our product management and R & D teams, and extensive feedback from customers, partners and analysts, we are proud to bring to market what many have told us is this industry's most groundbreaking solution to-date," said R. Andrew Eckert, SumTotal CEO. "SumTotal 7.0 is the culmination of the product vision we established when our two companies merged earlier this year. Today, we have successfully combined the strengths of two products and two organisations to bring our customers one of the most powerful tools they can deploy to accelerate readiness, business performance and profits."
SumTotal 7.0 is comprised of eight, globally-scalable business performance management applications that enable companies to embed learning activities and relevant content into everyday business processes to achieve bottom-line results. Integrated into a single, comprehensive suite, the applications include:
- TotalLMS - delivers, manages, tracks and reports on any blend of learning activities: self-paced Web, live interactive Web, on-the-job, traditional instructor-led and documentation.
- TotalLCMS - provides a complete environment for creating, managing, assembling, and delivering learning content.
- TotalDashboard - offers the most complete packaged solution for measuring and analysing the impact of learning activities on business performance by connecting to mission-critical applications
- TotalPerformance - provides a performance management solution that ensures all levels of the organisation are aligned and working together to attain business objectives
- TotalAccess - enables offline learning capabilities for the mobile workforce
- TotalCollaboration - allows instant learner collaboration with peers and experts
- TotalInformation -- helps manage tacit knowledge by allowing authorised users to publish and manage unstructured content to any Web server, with instant, searchable access to information
- Virtual Classroom -- provides a live, Web-based forum for real-time communication and collaboration among geographically dispersed individuals
Leading industry analyst firm brandon-hall.com evaluated SumTotal 7.0 for its LMS Knowledgebase. In their write-up, the reviewing analysts wrote, " We were literally one of the first to review the new LMS solution in action. What we discovered is that the new offering isn't just "the best of Aspen meets Docent;" rather, SumTotal commendably took this opportunity to apply "lessons learned" from both companies and to create something robust and brand new." The report continued on to say, "This system is ideally suited for large-scale, enterprise implementations, but is easy enough to use for literally any setting."
Developed to address both the specific needs of vertical industries, as well as broad-reaching business challenges common across all industry sectors, SumTotal 7.0 enables organisations to effectively manage certifications and regulatory compliance; bring new products to market faster; ensure personnel readiness; align individual and corporate objectives; and communicate and collaborate in real-time with employees, channel partners, customers and suppliers.
Industry "Firsts"
SumTotal was founded on a history of industry "firsts" and SumTotal 7.0 is no exception, incorporating a list of key technology innovations that allow it to react fluidly to changes in organisations and in the marketplace as a whole. Most notable among these innovations are:
Open Activity Architecture (OAA) - a next-generation functionality that allows for streamlined management of blended learning, learning plans and courses. OAA enables the creation and maintenance of a single learning curriculum that can dynamically reconstitute itself into different learning activity combinations depending upon the group or individual. OAA allows for seamless management of the movement of those groups or individuals through the curriculum from a single point rather than requiring the creation of separate curricula for each discreet group of learners. System administrators can then set one or more prescribed learning paths or tracks through the curriculum based on job role, group membership, hire status or any number of other factors.
OAA also enables the system to dynamically adjust the prescribed learning paths to accommodate reorganisations of groups or other changes within the learner population moving through the curriculum. By automating tasks and processes such as these, that have traditionally been manual or required duplication, OAA lowers total cost of ownership, significantly reduces the administrative cycle time for organisational learning initiatives, and improves organisational performance.
Dynamic Domains - allows for grouping of individuals into a "domain," according to job role, corporate division or other characteristic, in keeping with a company's internal and external organisational hierarchy. Learning administrators can easily prescribe and manage specific learning activities based on group membership, or by audience, a sub-grouping that may combine members of several groups for a specific learning activity. The dynamic domains functionality allows individual learners to be members of several groups depending upon the learning requirements of the organisation.
Prescribed learning changes automatically and dynamically when individuals change job roles or move to other groups, allowing the correct training to "follow" employees. Dynamic domains significantly reduces cycle time by automating time-consuming manual administration, and ensures that employees get the training they need to be more rapidly productive and proficient at their jobs no matter what their career paths.
Web Services - provide unparalleled interoperability with companies' existing, heterogeneous technological environments, whether .Net, J2EE or other environments. Dedicated to creating the most "open" architecture possible in SumTotal 7.0, SumTotal is the first provider in the industry to furnish customers with a Web Services software developer kit (SDK), exposing the majority of the LMS' capabilities to give customers even greater freedom and flexibility to adapt the platform to their organisations.
With more than 100 Web Services included in SumTotal 7.0, enterprises can easily integrate the platform with internal and external portals, HRIS and ERP systems, content and document management systems and other technology applications, allowing for real-time data integration and ad-hoc reporting from many sources. SumTotal 7.0 further streamlines integrations by supporting the latest Web Services standards, such as SOAP, WSDL and Disco. Web Services significantly reduce costs by eliminating the need for time-consuming IT intervention and systems integration.
Embedded LMS Reporting Capabilities - With the launch of SumTotal 7.0, TotalLMS now incorporates in-depth, dynamic reporting capabilities and a unique reporting framework out of the box. TotalLMS' rich reporting capability allows companies to easily and securely create a wide variety of reports from any LMS data, effectively measuring the impact of learning activities on a wide range of business metrics and objectives. Individual users can now create new, custom reports that organise just the right data in just the right format for their specific reporting and analysis requirements.
"I have been very impressed with SumTotal's ability to quickly bring together Click2learn and Docent and create a market leader in the fragmented learning market," said Josh Bersin, industry analyst and principal at Bersin & Associates. "SumTotal 7.0 is a market-leading platform that builds upon many years of R&D from the Docent and Aspen platforms. We expect it to be on the short-list of any organisation looking for an enterprise-class learning platform."
For more information about the new SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0, or to learn about upgrading, please visit www.sumtotalsystems.com or phone +44 (0) 207-517-4200.