Posted May 1, 2013 by Stefan Leyhane
We’re thrilled to officially announce our partnership with Richardson to deliver their online training. Richardson is one of the leading companies in sales training and strategy execution.
Richardson released a nice press release yesterday to announce our partnership:
Richardson, a leading global sales training and strategy execution company, today announced a partnership with Firmwater, a specialized learning management system (LMS) vendor, for delivering their award-winning online sales training, Richardson QuickSkills.
The Richardson QuickSkills library consists of over 60 core selling, service, and sales coaching courses and is considered the most in-depth and proven web-based sales, service, and management curriculum in the industry. Firmwater assisted Richardson in migrating all existing clients and historical data to the Firmwater LMS platform. The system will serve as the platform on which Richardson will continue to support and grow its online training presence.
We started working with them towards the end of last year. It’s been a great relationship so far and we look forward to continue to support them and help them grow their online presence.
Read the full release which includes a nice quote about us from Joe Jacobs, Richardson’s SVP and Chief Technical Officer.
Posted August 21, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
We released an update last night that includes improvements for our clients who collect taxes when people purchase their courses or memberships to their course libraries.
Taxes are complicated
Tax calculation is more complicated than you’d think. Taxes are sometimes calculated based on the purchaser’s address and sometimes based on the course’s location. If you offer registration options, like a course manual or accommodation to go with some instructor-led training, the taxes that apply to those options may differ from the ones that apply to the course itself.
In some areas, such as Quebec in Canada, you have taxes which are cumulative. QST is applied to the price of the product or service after GST is applied.
Often, taxes are only charged if the purchaser is located within a particular area. If you’re based in Australia, you might only need to charge GST to people who live there. All others don’t pay any tax.
Rest assured, Firmwater LMS supports all these scenarios.
Recent improvements
Our latest update includes the following improvements:
1. You can now select the tax schedule to use when setting a price.
If you have one or more tax schedules defined, you can now specify which one to use (or none) when setting a price for a course, registration option, or membership type.
2. Calculated taxes are now shown on all pages before payment.
- Course registration pages
- Membership sign-up page
- Membership renewal page
- Administrator’s pages for creating, renewing, or editing a user’s membership
We hope you find these improvements useful. If you have any questions or need help setting up tax collection for your courses, please get in touch with us.
Posted July 26, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
We added a new option today to allow your users to use email addresses to log in to the system instead of usernames.
With all the Web sites that you need to access these days, it’s often difficult to remember your username — especially when someone has gotten your preferred username before you. Since email addresses are unique, the task is more straightforward. You often want to collect the email address of your users anyway, so using it to log in means one less field they have to fill in.
Here’s how to switch to use email addresses
- From the ‘Configuration’ tab, navigate to the ‘Settings’ page.
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Switch to edit ‘Accounts and Access’ from the drop-down menu (top-right).
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Select ‘Login with an email address’ under the ‘Usernames’ heading. Click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page.
If you have existing users in the organization, you can only make this change if all users have valid email addresses. You’ll be prompted to confirm the change.
Once the setting is changed, you’ll see your login page requires an email address instead of a username.
We’re now using this setting as our default for all new clients. We hope you find it useful too!
Posted April 23, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
Hot on the heels of editing attempts and scoring settings in bulk, you can now edit presentation settings in bulk.
Presentation settings determine some of the behavior and navigation of content — especially for tests and surveys — when users interact with it. The settings control things such as time limits, whether to allow suspend and resume, and determine the feedback presented. This new feature makes life easier for our clients with large content libraries who customize the course behavior for each of their clients.
Editing settings
- Select one or more of your courses from the ‘Activities’ page in the ‘Content’ tab and select the ‘Presentation’ operation.
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A pop-up dialog is displayed. Select the type of item that you’d like to change.
Courses can contain lots of items within them (such as pre-tests, lessons, and study guides). Settings are applied to items of a specific type. So you can change the settings for all your pre-tests in one operation.
- After selecting a type, the settings are enabled and show the current state for the selected items. If a mix of values exist, that is conveyed. Make your changes and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
- After the changes are made, the dialog is dismissed and feedback is presented. The feedback includes a link to undo the changes.
Enjoy!
