Author Archive
Direct feedback from our most recent Bright implementation:
When you responded to our RFP, we didn’t understand all the terminology in the response so we hired a consultant to help us pick our vendor.
Her feedback was that your existing customers loved using your service, and that drove our decision.
Tools are nice, but driving for customer satisfaction is what drives us. What does that mean? It changes every day, actually.
We can’t always anticipate the problems and challenges that an individual project or implementation will face. It could be technology, or it could be organizational. But we do know that to serve our customers, we need to produce software that adapts to the problem at hand, and we need a services model that adapts to the customer organization. That’s the Bright Manifesto for Great Customer Satisfaction in a nutshell.
If you are a popup hater, you’ll want to have a look at our new help document on launching course from Bright and SCORM Cloud without the dreaded popups.
https://help.aura-software.com/using-scorm-cloud-without-the-popup-window/
Lot’s of nice fancy recipes in there for presenting a more integrated feel for your courseware and your content delivery site.
From
Hey #DevLearn I'm giving a talk on learning ecosystems at 3:15 in the expo hall @ mgmt exchange stage. Stop by!
— Julian Napolitan (@juliannapolitan) November 16, 2016
Or as we like to say, Enable e-learning where your users ALREADY are….
Why did we build Bright the way we did?
Maybe it’s because people say things like this:
“Do people only ever complain about their learning management system (LMS)? It seems that the excitement and anticipation before the LMS arrives is fan-fared with bold exclamations of its all-encompassing functionality: “It does everything! There is so much content! And it even integrates learning, talent, and performance metrics!” But the technology lands and reality dawns. The fanfares dull to: “No one’s using it, and now it’s become a millstone around my neck.”
Read the full article here, LMS Manages Learners but the Business Needs More
Our only goal is to make that story go away.
Want to hear how we create Learning Management projects people don’t hate? Read about it and then ask us!.
Or checkout what our customers are saying.
Bright is fundamentally different than a traditional LMS. It is our goal to help you escape from the constraints of the shrink-wrapped monoliths; software that makes a lot of assumptions about how you will interact with your learner. Bright is so different that what don’t even consider it an LMS, we consider it an “LMS escape portal”.
For example, with Bright, you can put a list of courses anywhere on your website, adapted to your content strategy, not ours. By default, our embeddable widgets pick up your site’s default CSS, so “branding” is never an issue. Putting a logo image at the top of some brittle SAAS tool is NOT branding 😉
In keeping with this vision of “your model, not ours”, we’ve greatly enhanced the flexibility of the Bright Course Table in the latest version of Bright. We’ve also tried to turn on more of the functionality by default, so we closer align to the most common use cases straight out of the box.
Specifically:
- We now support literally any filtering strategy, such as by course metadata like category. Control exactly what courses you serve, and where, and by what rules.
- By default, the table is now wrapped in an interactive paginated, sortable, and searchable web interface. Awesome is now the default.
- Certificate Linking is now the default. Don’t want certificates? No problem, just disable it.
- Self Registration is now turned on by default. “Managed” learning is overrated. Need to control access? We get it … and turning off self-registration is a snap. Do it different ways on different pages, or for different users, or whatever scheme you can imagine.
All the juicy docs are here on the Aura Documentation site. What good is software if no one can use it?
But hey, why not just grab a demo account and play with it yourself? Hit us up and we’ll get you one in a jiffy!
Once you see how Bright works, you’ll be asking yourself, “why would I do this any other way?!”
Recently, in response to some inquiries from some Financial types, we reached out to a couple of knowledgeable customers [and one partner] asking them:
If you didn’t use Bright, what would you use? Who do you think our competition is?
This is relevant to us as Bright sits firmly in the middle of the Build vs. Buy debate. So, it can be a bit difficult to say who we are actually competing against.
In any event, one of our customers sent us this, which I attach here:
Are we serious about the availability of our service? You bet we are.
Some metrics of how serious we are:
* 87 remote monitors on everything from web server response, disk space, swap space, DNS, job status, you name it.
* As of June 2015, we had 110 automated tests. As of today, the # has topped 260.
How does it manifest itself? Here’s an excerpt of an email I received from a customer who monitors the uptime of all of their cloud vendors.
Why is it title: “you did it again?” It’s not the first time we’ve been measured at 100% available for an entire month. Word in the Aura lab is, “next month, we go for 110% available”.
Our hosting provider recently received several Xen Security Advisories (XSAs) that require them to perform updates to their host servers. In order to apply the updates, these machines which host Bright must be rebooted. The XSAs will be publicly released by the Xen project team on October 29th, therefore they must complete the updates before that date.
These updates are required to protect the security and safe operations of not only our infrastructure, but yours as well. We understand that a disruption with such limited notice is inconvenient, and we hope you understand that these measures are warranted due to the severity of the XSAs.
Please see the maintenance window below. Unfortunately, our hosting provider does not provide us with the ability to change these. The outage can happen anywhere within a 2 hour window, but should last only as long as it takes the machine to reboot; which is approximately 5 minutes.
For Bright North American customers:
9PM Eastern Time, Oct 19th and/or Oct 20th [contact us for the exact date for your service].
For Bright European Customers:
9PM GMT, Oct 20th or Oct 23rd [contact us for the exact date for your service].
