Posted December 5, 2011 by Richard G. Williams
Today, Firmwater celebrates its 10th anniversary!
Founded in the tumultuous times, we’ve overcome the hurdles that have stopped many new ventures in their tracks. We started out consulting, providing web application design and development services, including playing a pivotal role in the development of several fundraising systems.
But rather quickly, the consulting work led us back to our roots of knowledge assessment and learning management. In 2003, we started developing a test and survey engine. An inquiry from some former colleagues (and a current client) soon had us designing and developing a learning management system built specifically for e-learning content providers.
Our goals at the time:
- a clean and easy to use interface for both the learner and the administrator - after all a learning management system that requires user training seems counter intuitive
- ubiquitous availability - Internet browser based delivery with any standards compliant web browser without the need for any third party plug-ins or extensions
- support for the then emerging SCORM 2004 (and earlier 1.2) standards so content can be developed using a choice of best of breed authoring tools
- provide our clients with visibility and the ability to manage all of their customers with a single logon
- deliver the software as a service, alleviating our clients of the worries of hosting and allowing us to keep the product current as the web evolves
We’ve achieved these goals and they remain central to the ongoing development of the service.
Since the Firmwater LMS went live in January, 2005, our clients have delivered their training products to over 110,000 people in over 480 organizations around the world.
The LMS has:
- processed over 2.7 million login requests,
- delivered over 7.5 million interactive learning objects (SCO’s in SCORM speak), and
- administered over 465,000 tests and surveys in which it has recorded over 10.8 million responses.
Our clients are diverse, offering training on a wide range of topics from Industrial skills and safety training, workplace violence and harassment, presentation skills, to breastfeeding education.
Our largest customer supports over 68,000 users in over 210 organizations with just two full time support staff, a testament to the reliability and maturity of the LMS. However, when they are faced with issues outside of their expertise, they know we are there to stand beside them.
We continue to invest in the ongoing development of the Firmwater LMS. There have been 29 releases since March, 2007 with the latest release out just last week (more to come on that and other releases in future posts to this site). We remain focused on developing the features asked for by our customers.
To this day, we remain focused on helping training companies transform and grow their businesses online. If this story resounds with yours, drop us a line and let’s see if there’s a fit between our capabilities and your needs. Perhaps we can help you take your training business to the next level!
To our customers, we thank you for your patronage, patience and support through the years. To our families, we thank you for believing in us, putting up with some late night or early morning hours on occasion and being understanding.
Posted April 29, 2011 by Stefan Leyhane
We released some enhancements this morning that help you manage the Continuing Education credits earned when your courses are taken. If you provide completion certificates when users successfully complete your courses, the credits earned are listed on the certificates.
This morning’s enhancements allow you to define the credit types that are available and to assign credits against your courses. Here’s a quick overview of how to use the new functionality:
Define Continuing Education credit types
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Enable ‘Continuing Education Credits’ functionality for your organization from the Settings page.
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With the functionality turned on, you’ll see a new ‘Credit Types’ menu for the Configuration tab. This page shows you all the Continuing Education credit types that are available for an organization.
You can add new types and, if you have more than one defined, you can drag to set the order that they are displayed in.
Assign credits to your courses
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To assign credits to one of your courses, go to the course summary page and click the ‘Edit’ link.
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Switch to the ‘Credits and Certificate’ page.
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Assign values to one or more of the listed credit types and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
It’s as simple as that. You’ll now see the credits listed on the course summary page. If completion certificate access is enabled, the certificates will include information about the credits earned.
We’ve got some more enhancements planned to expose more information about the Continuing Education credit earned by users in reports, so stay tuned. Enjoy!
Posted March 10, 2011 by Stefan Leyhane
We just released the first phase of some work we’re doing on adding more email capability to the system. We have plans for adding a number of different email notifications but the first allows you to send welcome messages to your users. This is good way to introduce new users to your program or course and provide them with a link that allows them to set their password and access the system.
How to send messages
Welcome messages can be sent or resent one at a time or in bulk.
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Use the new ‘Send welcome message’ action from the user summary page. The user must have a well-formed email address for the action to be enabled.
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Select one or more users from the users list page and use the ‘Send welcome message’ operation.
If you’ve setup a new client, have assigned content to the users and are ready to go live, this is a good way to send messages to all the users.
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You can also send welcome messages to new users when importing a list of users. Enable the ‘Send users a welcome message’ checkbox on the confirmation page.
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If you allow users to signup and create their own accounts, you can have a welcome message sent to new users when this happens.
Configuring your emails
You can configure which emails are turned on for any of your clients from the Support and Email Settings page. You can also specify the email’s sender name and reply to address. In the future, this is also where you’ll edit the content of the emails if you want to customize them. We haven’t added that capability yet. Until then, if you want a custom message, just let us know and we’ll be happy to configure it for you.
High deliverability
Our email infrastructure is designed for high deliverability so emails should avoid junk filters and make it through to your users’ inboxes. It is also designed to scale, as we expect to send tens of thousands of emails each month.
We’re excited to build on this first phase of email capability. We hope you like it.
Posted November 18, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
Just a quick note to say that we added support for meeting password complexity requirements early this morning in a new release of our LMS.
You’ve always had the option of enforcing a minimum password length and requiring users to change their password after a certain number of days. Now you can require that their password meet other criteria.
To start, we have two options:
- No complexity requirements (default)
- Start with letter, and contain at least one number and one special character
You can set the password settings on the Accounts and Access page.
We’re able to add other complexity requirements so if one of your clients or prospects has a specific requirement, let us know!
