Is an LMS the answer to your content delivery problem?

In a recent discussion on the Elearning Network LinkedIn group, a question was asked about developing a business case to deliver an intranet system – which focussed on content &document delivery.

Given the audience inside this group, most of the responses that came back were from suppliers of Learning Management Systems (LMS).

My response to the discussion was as follows:

I’m not convinced that an LMS is the whole (or even part) of the answer here.

It seems to me that the business requirements are to:

Ensure that people are using the most current materials

Manage an audit trail of changes

Ensure that people can find what they need as quickly as possible

Ensure that people are notified when a new version of a particular document is made available (although I’m not sure yet whether that’s by optional subscription, or forced)

The business benefits would be:

Increased efficiency

Increased accuracy and currency of information

Increased transparency and auditability

There are any number of systems that would do this, but you won’t find them marketed in here, as they’re not specific learning systems. Much depends on your corporate philosophy around self-hosted or SAAS, and your IT team’s technology preferences. But also I expect there will be some major functional requirements around setting access permissions, groups, reporting and so on.

Options include:

Google Apps for Business (specifically Google Drive)

Alfresco

MS Sharepoint

If you can move people away from Word docs, and get them using HTML pages, then you could also use:

WordPress

Liferay

Drupal

Kentico

Django

and hundreds of content management systems

Both WordPress and Liferay also have plugins for displaying elearning content; Learndash and Valamis respectively

I hope that helps.