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.

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.

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

1. From the 'Configuration' tab, navigate to the 'Settings' page.

2. Switch to edit 'Accounts and Access' from the drop-down menu (top-right).

   

3. 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!

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

1. Select one or more of your courses from the 'Activities' page in the 'Content' tab and select the 'Presentation' operation.

2. 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.

3. 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.
4. After the changes are made, the dialog is dismissed and feedback is presented. The feedback includes a link to undo the changes.

Enjoy!

One particular client has hundreds of courses in their library. Each course contains about 30 hours of training material but includes a pre-test so that users who know the material can test out. When a new client signs up, they configure the passing score required to test out and, in some cases, the number of attempts allowed at it based on the client's requirements.

We've always allowed you to modify these settings on a course by course basis. In our most recent release, we now make it simple for you to edit these settings in bulk.

Here's how you do it

1. Select one or more of your courses from the 'Activities' page in the 'Content' tab and select the 'Attempts and scoring' operation.

2. 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.

3. 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.
4. After the changes are made, the dialog is dismissed and feedback is presented. The feedback includes a link to undo the changes.

The 'Attempts and scoring' operation is also available when looking at all courses that have a specific tag applied. If your course library is segmented into series or by publisher, this makes it really easy to change all the settings for your groups of courses.

For those of you with large content libraries, we hope this addition is useful!

Here's 7 of the many reasons why we chose and continue to choose OrcsWeb:

1. Solid Infrastructure
2. Microsoft Technology Specialization
3. Dedicated and Stable Support Team
4. High Availability
5. Full Service Solution
6. Scalability and Flexibility
7. Peace of Mind

Solid Infrastructure

A solid infrastructure starts with good bones. OrcsWeb is co-located within Peak 10's data center, a world class hosting facility that includes multiple high speed connections to Tier 1 Internet carriers, multiple power sources providing uninterruptable power, top notch environmental control and physical security systems that meet or exceed industry standards.

Microsoft Technology Specialization

ORCS Web only hosts applications built upon Microsoft's technology stack.

The Firmwater LMS is a Microsoft .NET application built on the Microsoft technology stack (Windows Server, Internet Information Server, SQL Server and Reporting Services).

By hosting with a Microsoft specialist, we benefit from ORCS Web's broader knowledge of Microsoft technologies. We've been able to leverage ORCS Web's knowledge and expertise to move quicker than if we had to do it all on our own.

Dedicated and Stable Support Team

OrcsWeb provides Firmwater with a dedicated support team which means they have familiarity with our application and are able to help us solve problems efficiently. A stable staff is one of the hallmarks of a great organization, and most members of our OrcsWeb support team have been on the team since day one.

High Availability

The Firmwater LMS is hosted on a combination of OrcsWeb Cloud Servers and dedicated servers. All servers are built using Enterprise-Class hardware with Gigabit speed network connections and built-in redundancy. Managed daily backups, managed anti-virus and firewall protection secure our servers from malicious attempts to access information maintaining the security of our customers' data.

As a result, in a typical month, we see 99.98% to 100% availability. Unplanned downtime is rare. Planned downtime is limited to that which is needed to apply operating system and application updates.

Full Service Solution

The OrcsWeb team takes complete care of our hosting environment from backups through to applying the latest Microsoft updates. We regularly call upon the team to help us with day to day administration. Requests are handled promptly, usually within minutes. OrcsWeb's support team allows Firmwater to focus on our efforts on supporting our customers and continuing development of the Firmwater LMS application.

Scalability and Flexibility

When the need for more resources arises, OrcsWeb has been able to deploy additional resources to our servers quickly. When the situation dictates, we've been able to add resources within hours.

Peace of Mind

At the end of the day, we have the peace of mind in knowing that OrcsWeb is watching our back. They monitor our servers around the clock every day of the year. Day or night, they will take action on our behalf when needed and keep us apprised of actions taken.

What does this mean to our customers? Simply that the Firmwater LMS is always available and running reliably around the clock.

Read more about our experience with OrcsWeb here

Some of our clients want to ensure that their course post-tests or exams are taken in a controlled environment -- or at least confirm the user taking the test is in fact the actual person. Here's how it works:

Designate an item as requiring a proctor

1. From the 'Content' tab, go to the course summary page.
2. Click on the item that you'd like to require a proctor for.
3. From the item's summary page, click 'Edit'.
4. Switch to the 'Attempts and Scoring' page.
5. Check off the new 'Require proctor' option and click 'Save Changes'.

Launching the proctored item

When a user tries to launch the item, she is presented with a dialog indicating that an administrator is required to authorize the launch.

Any administrator that has the user in scope can authorize the launch by entering their username and password with the following exclusions:

• Users cannot act as a proctor for themselves.
• Report-only administrators cannot act as proctors.

After a proctor has authorized the launch, the dialog indicates that the item can be launched.

Authorization is only good for the next launch of that attempt and has a short expiry time (5 minutes). If a user suspends a proctored item, she will require a proctor's authorization to resume it.

As an administrator, you can see who acted as a proctor for a user's attempts at an item on the Attempts page.

More coming

The work we've done so far handles the single computer scenario well. This is where the student and proctor both use a shared computer. We plan on adding some more administrative functionality to deal with the classroom environment as well.

We'd love to hear your feedback on how this works for you! Enjoy.

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.

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

1. Enable 'Continuing Education Credits' functionality for your organization from the Settings page.

2. 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

1. To assign credits to one of your courses, go to the course summary page and click the 'Edit' link.

2. Switch to the 'Credits and Certificate' page.

3. 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!

How to send messages

Welcome messages can be sent or resent one at a time or in bulk.

1. 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.

   

2. 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.

   

3. 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.

   

4. 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.

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:

1. No complexity requirements (default)
2. 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!

Assign content based on language or membership type

Membership registration

We added two new filter options to assignments. You can now create rules to deliver content to users based on the membership type of a user or on the user's language. Of course, you'll only see these new options for clients that have membership enabled or support multiple languages.

Membership registration

You can now designate specific membership types that allow self-registration. When enabled, each membership type will have its own registration page. By visiting the page, a user can create and pay for membership when signing up for an account.

And, paired with the new assignment membership type filter, new members who register will be able to access training content immediately.

To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.14.

New help documentation

Help documentation

Search across clients

Assessment presentation settings

We've completely revamped the help documentation that is available from within the LMS. This was a long process but useful to us as it identified a few areas of our application where we can improve things. There is now complete documentation for both administrators and students. It can be accessed from the 'Help' link in the top-right corner of the LMS when you're logged in (it's also available on our public site's support section). The documentation you see from within the LMS depends on your assigned role.

Documentation is an ongoing process so we'll continue to improve it over time. We also have plans of making the default help page context-sensitive so that it's determined by which page it was launched from.

Search across all your clients

It was really easy to search for a user within an organization -- but not if you didn't know what organization the user was associated with. Sometimes you may get a support request in the form of a voicemail or in an email which doesn't give a clue as to the person's organization.

We recognized that we didn't have an effective way for administrators to search across all their clients. Given that some of our clients have hundreds of their own clients using our LMS, we needed to do something.

We've added a new tab called 'Search' which is available, for now, only to Master Administrators (in fact, it is their new default page). It provides a quick way to search for a user or to jump to a client. The page may look a little sparse for now but, don't worry, we've got greater plans for this page coming.

Edit presentation settings of assessments

Our built-in assessment engine offers many presentation options to control the user's experience when taking a test or survey. You can specify:

• a time limit
• whether users can suspend and resume an attempt
• how users can navigate through questions
• what feedback is displayed
• the information displayed to the user after they complete an attempt

While we've always allowed you to control these settings at author-time, we didn't provide an easy way to update these on the fly. This is now possible. This is especially useful for our clients who share the same test or survey across many clients but want different settings to be used.

Easier updating of your content

Quite often, typos are found or some tweaks are required after you deploy your learning content to a population of users. We've made it easier for you to update previously loaded content. There is now a new option on the content loading page which specifies that you want to update the resources of content in place.

Other new features and enhancements

A few more of the new features and enhancements include:

• Ability to display the list of locations as an expandable hierarchy
• Ensure that learning content with long-running videos doesn't time out
• Complete support for SCORM 2004 roll-up rules

To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.13.

So, a number of months ago, I planned to work with some of the more recognized authoring tools to test out their functionality and report back on my learning experiences. I started my learning journey with Camtasia Studio 6 and decided that the best way to truly understand the challenges training vendors face when creating SCORM content is to actually take on a content creation project myself. And after much deliberation, our team here at Firmwater settled on developing a new user orientation video, to instruct students on how to navigate our LMS.

So, instead of getting right into the "goods and bads" of Camtasia, I thought it would be more helpful if I mentioned some of my lessons learned during the course of my first ever content authoring experience. So, here's my list:

Being new to working with a LMS, he's not well-versed in the technical jargon of the learning industry -- he doesn't speak SCORM. He had a folder of content and wanted to be able to load it and have students view it. Understandable. Our client had received the published files from a colleague so he hadn't actually used Presenter himself, nor did he know what format the files were in.

I'm not aware of any of our other clients' use of Adobe Presenter so I didn't have any hands on experience with it. In the PowerPoint-to-Flash learning category of authoring tools, the majority leans heavily to the use of Articulate Presenter. Articulate has great support and a strong community behind them. They've got lots of useful articles about working with their tools, including this one detailing step-by-step instructions for publishing to a LMS. Adobe... not so much.

I went hunting on the Web for instructions to help our client out. The best I could find on how to publish from Presenter to a LMS was a partial screen shot of the product's 'Reporting' tab (on Adobe's features page).

Since I couldn't find any instructions, I figured it would be worthwhile to download their product, try it out and document how to do it.