OpenText Corporation is an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management. It helps organizations manage their business content. OpenText began as a spin-off company from the University of Waterloo and over the following 20 years became the market leader in providing Enterprise Content Management solutions that bring together people, processes, and information.
OpenText has over 140 different product variations within its product portfolio. It was becoming too difficult to manage the product knowledge training through face-to-face instructor-led training, so management wanted to test online training to deliver a more paperless training. They also recognized the need to help the 800 strong sales force to understand and keep up-to-date with the product set through more accessible training.
Initially OpenText looked at the target audience and focused on a small subset to begin with: the 800 strong sales team which was spread across the globe. They proceeded to evaluate over 30 different corporate LMS in the marketplace and finally settled on one. This was used for six months to roll out an online college for the sales team, with assignments, Scorm objects and chat, but the project didn't go as well as expected.
However, they found challenges with administration, user navigation and collaboration tools which sent them looking again. This time Moodle was identified internally as a viable option which delivered on all the core features required.
One of the reasons, although not the primary reason was budget. The cost of rolling out Moodle was within the budget levels that had been assigned for the first project. However, the things that stood out for OpenText were the collaboration tools such as the forum and chat were impressive. The assignment types and interactive correction tools were comparable to a top corporate LMS. The intuitive user navigation interface and administration underlined the difference in platforms. Crucially the system was also a stable platform, and any time that any issues did arise, the Moodle Partner Remote-Learner were able to solve them quickly.
Rahmat explains that the move to Moodle was a huge success for OpenText. They moved from just sales "field enablement" to a corporate-wide delivery of training. Then OpenText included external sales partner companies and built a partner portal within Moodle for knowledge sharing.
They built a professional development series of 120 different courses which were developed in-house, all working in Moodle. This was in addition to the deployment of over 2,500 off-the-shelf Scorm and AICC courses, including a range from Skillsoft which enabled easy delivery and consistent reporting.
The flexibility and ease of customization of the system was one of the biggest benefits as Rahmat explained, "you can bend Moodle to work the way that you want to, rather than having to bend to work the way it wants you to".
The ROI was significant with corporate wide adoption of e-learning, saving time and money. "Moodle is a cost effective choice for delivering learning across the company and partners", concluded Rahmat.
Through experience Rahmat felt that whether it is open source or proprietary systems you are evaluating, you need to focus on the feature set in your LMS analysis and on the level of support that's available both commercially and within the community.
"You don't need an in-house programmer to roll out Moodle", Rahmat explained, "as much of the changes you need to do just don't need it, but when its something major you can get a specialist Moodle Partner in."
Rahmat had a few bits of advice for potential Moodlers:
- As with any project that involves people's data, it is important to involve the IT and security departments as early as possible to ensure that critical data is managed correctly
- Before you start deploying users into the system, take the time to analyze your ERP system to see what user fields you want to be using in Moodle, so you customize them before you have a lot of user accounts already created