LMS
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.
-
Switch to edit ‘Accounts and Access’ from the drop-down menu (top-right).
-
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 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
-
Enable ‘Continuing Education Credits’ functionality for your organization from the Settings page.
-
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
-
To assign credits to one of your courses, go to the course summary page and click the ‘Edit’ link.
-
Switch to the ‘Credits and Certificate’ page.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
Posted December 9, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
Just a quick note to mention that we’ve added support for Spanish to our LMS. This adds to the existing language support that we have — both for students and administrators — for English and French.
You can choose which languages you’d like to make available for your organization’s users. And, if you’re interested in adding support for another language, please contact us.
Esperamos que te guste!
Posted October 10, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
It is a long weekend for us here in Canada (Happy Thanksgiving!) and also for those lucky enough in the U.S. to get Columbus Day off on Monday. Perfect time for a new release of our LMS — so we deployed Version 2.12 last night.
This one took a little longer than usual to get out the door, but hopefully it will prove to be worth the wait. We upgraded some of our infrastructure in the process, so we needed to be extra careful to make sure that everything works smoothly. Along with several bug fixes, there are over 20 new features. Here are the highlights:
Custom domains
Interaction Data Report
New file upload interface
We offer our service as a white-label solution. When you offer our LMS to your clients, we want it to appear as if you made it. You control the branding and the terminology used. Your clients see your contact support information and the system can be customized so that emails are sent from your organization.
The final step to completely hide Firmwater from view was to allow you to use your own custom domain. We had done this for a few of our larger clients but it wasn’t easy for us to manage this across a large number of clients. Now we can offer it to everybody.
You can now choose to use your own domain. So, instead of sending out addresses to your clients with ‘lms.firmwater.com’, you can use a URL such as:
‘lms.yourcompany.com’ or ‘portal.yourcompany.com’ (or whatever you’d like).
Note that there is an additional monthly charge to make use of a custom domain. This requires some setup on our part and we incur additional costs to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain and for dedicated IP addresses.
If you’re interested, or for more details, please contact us.
Simpler login URLs
Upgrading our infrastructure has given us some additional capabilities that we didn’t have before. We’ve now been able to simplify the addresses of your login page and those of your clients (the old addresses still work too). You can now just tack on your client ID to the domain used.
If your client’s ID is ‘yourclient’, their login page can now be accessed at ‘lms.firmwater.com/yourclient’. (Previously, you would have to use ‘https://lms.firmwater.com/lms/?cid=yourclient’.)
This works if you’re using a custom domain as well. Your client’s login page would be accessed at ‘lms.yourcompany.com/yourclient’.
Improved reporting
Reporting now uses an updated platform, allowing for better support from all browsers and, in many cases, improved report execution times. Users will no longer experience application time outs while interacting with reports for long periods of time. We’ve also organized the list of reports into menus to make it easier to find similar reports.
Along with making improvements to several of the existing reports, we also added two new reports:
- Interaction Data Report: Export of the SCORM interaction data saved per user attempt. Some content saves question response data to the LMS through this mechanism.
- Location List: Lists all locations and the number of users for each.
Other new features and enhancements
A few more of the new features and enhancements include:
- Support for taxes when making purchases through the LMS.
- Importing of locations, departments, job titles.
- An improved file upload interface.
We hope you enjoy all the new features. To see everything that’s new, see the release notes for Version 2.12.
Posted December 2, 2008 by Benjamin Schmidt
Many training vendors struggle with what is needed to deploy their online courses. Firmwater has developed a Learning Management System (LMS) strictly for training vendors.
In order to help you understand the best practices for finding the right LMS for your situation, we have authored a guide especially for you. The guide outlines seven factors you need to consider when searching for a LMS.
The guide is called 7 Key Things for Training Vendors to Consider When Selecting a Learning Management System. As always, your comments are sincerely welcomed.
