I’ve now conquered my 4^th public-facing SharePoint portal. This one was a little different because it was designed to serve as a platform for a learning management system (LMS). We went with SharePoint LMS (www.sharepointlms.com). Last year we did a proof of concept and deployed it internally to make sure we understood what we were getting ourselves into. This year it was time to prove we could do it. I have mixed but overall positive feelings about this product. It does do what it claims on the brochure – but in some ways certain things could be done much better.

We were able to create our own SCORM compliant flash e-learning lessons and get them to work within the LMS. All of the lessons scored properly – so it was comforting to know that we were able to move our lessons from one LMS straight into another LMS. Our requirements were fairly straight forward:

1. Develop a working LMS
2. Migrate our content into the new LMS
3. Migrate user scores into the LMS
4. Allow for multiple learning paths per course
5. Add surveys at the end of each course
6. Generate certificates for users
7. Support prerequisites within the learning paths
8. Allow users to bookmark their progress within their lessons
9. Allow users to track their progress through lessons
10. Allow users to retake lessons as they wish
11. Make sure the menus were not confusing

There were more – but that’s a good overview of what we set out to do. Because SharePoint out of the box is so plain-vanilla – we also designed a fully custom theme to make it look more like a web-site. What we ended up with was a heavily customized SharePoint site. We got the learning management system to work. We created our own navigation and as-you-go help cues to assist users with using the site. As for the requirements :

1. We did create a fully functional LMS
2. All of the lessons were migrated in
3. We were able to migrate the user scores (but that’s another story for another post!)
4. We were able to create all of our learning paths
5. We were able to integrate surveys into the learning paths (but there’s more to add on how that worked ultimately!)
6. Certificate generation worked fine!
7. We got all of the prerequisites working – so you had to pass certain lessons to move onwards.
8. We got bookmarking to work (but we didn’t realize there were 2 levels of bookmarking!)
9. We were able to show users their progress (but I’ll talk about the grade book later)
10. Users could take lessons in or outside of their learning path
11. We did quite a bit to work with the menus – but even the default SharePoint menus are frustrating at times.

I should add that to deploy this it took a SharePoint administrator, SharePoint specialist or two, a SharePoint developer, a flash / SharePoint developer, as well as a full e-learning team. Once deployed the product is easy to use – but do not make the mistake of thinking it’s easy to deploy this.