OutStart, the leading provider of learning and knowledge sharing software, today announced major enhancements to its portfolio of products that make knowledge workers more efficient and effective. These significant new enhancements add powerful new functionality to each product, tighten integration across the company’s product suite and extend the learning ecosystem from formal and rapid environments to include self-service, on-demand learning. OutStart also announced OutStart LMS.com, a new ASP offering featuring Evolution LMS bundled with authoring, assessment, analytics and reporting.
OutStart’s v2006 provides a full portfolio of products to meet the learning and knowledge sharing needs of any size organization at any stage of the learning maturity model. Customers can now start with individual products and then add additional functionality, which work together, as needs expand. On-demand learning addresses the requirements for knowledge workers to get just-in-time, just-for-me learning and information through a self-service mode that enables them to perform their roles far more efficiently and effectively.
“To best meet our customers’ needs, we had two key objectives associated with our OutStart v2006 releases,” said Massood Zarrabian, president and chief executive officer for OutStart. “First was to maintain each product’s leadership position through key product enhancements and to deepen the synergy between products. And second, to meet a critical need for On-Demand learning. Formal and rapid learning is invaluable, but knowledge workers also have the need for immediate access to learning and knowledge as they perform their roles. OutStart v2006 extends the learning ‘ecosystem’ to now include ‘on-demand’ learning, and we believe will have a measurable impact on employee, partner, and customer effectiveness and efficiency.”
“The OutStart 2006 platform addresses a critical need in the industry because of its proactive focus on the convergence of traditional e-learning, knowledge management, and on-demand learning for knowledge workers,” said Bryan Chapman, e-learning analyst, at Brandon Hall Research. “This is significant because this convergence is the key to helping organizations more efficiently align their learning practices with business objectives, while creating more productive and efficient employees.”
OutStart Version 2006 includes:
OutStart Trainer – v2006 extends OutStart Trainer’s reputation for being both the most functionally rich and easiest to use desktop authoring tool. New features include an extensive set of wizards, enabling any function requiring more than 3 steps to be performed through a wizard without loosing any functionality; extended standards support with 508 compliant output and question level tracking; support for course creation in native languages, and new interactive training support. v2006 also includes extended integration with OutStart SoftSim as SoftSim simulations can now serve as content or graded assessments within Trainer.
OutStart Evolution LCMS – The most comprehensive and feature-rich LCMS has been extended with a broad array of enhancements including: support for both SCORM 1.2 and now SCORM 2004; Expanded media support, seamless use of OutStart Trainer and OutStart SoftSim content; NETg content integration; full FLASH support; configurability and metadata enhancements and PowerPoint Authoring to enable contribution by the masses and extending Evolution’s LCMS capabilities to PowerPoint.
OutStart Participate – The leading product for expertise, community and knowledge management has been expanded greatly to support “On-Demand” learning as Participate now has access to Learning Objects managed within the Evolution learner environment. Participate has significantly eased the challenge of contributing new knowledge through plug-ins for popular systems including MS Office products making contributing knowledge as easy as saving a file. Additionally, new connectors extend Participate’s access to new data systems to include document repositories, CRM and ERP applications, and the Internet. These capabilities along with an enhanced knowledge engine enables knowledge workers to use OutStart Participate as the single source for obtaining the on-demand learning and knowledge required to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently.
OutStart SoftSim – The market’s premier software application simulation tool now includes an enhanced instructional model, transition steps, styles-based document creation and more features to enable the simulations to even more closely mimic the real application, including multi-action steps, combo boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, drop down list and variable-based branching. Additionally, SoftSim is the first simulation tool to offer optional content management capabilities, including check-in/check out, centrally managed templates and skins, a publish and review mode, as well as central management of reviewers’ comments.
OutStart Evolution LMS – OutStart Evolution LMS offers a features rich learner environment at a fraction of the cost of comparable systems. New features include:
- Ease of use enhancements, such as a streamlined UI, access to individual SCOs or lower when searching, assigning, or consuming content, Outlook Calendar integration;
- An offline training mode;
- Extended features to further enable configuration over costly customization, such as configurable globalization support, role layout configuration, and multiple organization assignments;
- Extended management features, such as automated content enrollment settings, curriculum re-certification, attached resources for content, offline content consumption, and a new reporting engine;
- Enhanced standards support for ADA Section 508 Compliance level 1; SCORM 2004 and 1.2 delivery, and question level tracking.
OutStart LMS.com – The new ASP version of OutStart Evolution LMS can be deployed in less than one day for small-to-mid sized businesses. The ASP offering includes course authoring, assessment, analytics and reporting functionality in a single hosted service, as well as built-in support for Microsoft PowerPoint authoring and assessment creation and will work with all other OutStart products. With Evolution LMS as the foundation, organizations can readily migrate between the ASP and an enterprise implementation as their requirements grow with total investment protection.
About OutStart
OutStart software powers solutions that help make people more effective in a fraction of the time and cost. Unlike traditional training or knowledge management approaches that take too long, cost too much and fail to address the entire need, OutStart’s applications address the way people learn through a combination of formal training, knowledge sharing and expert collaboration that is available on-demand. Customers like Empire BlueCross BlueShield, Elsevier Health Sciences, Steelcase, the U.S. Navy, Verizon and Westland Helicopters rely on OutStart to increase individual and organizational performance, improve knowledge transfer and lower operating costs. Headquartered in Boston, Mass., OutStart has offices throughout the US and Europe and can be found on the Web at www.outstart.com.
