ExactLS - great functionality, business value, and expert staff
I am one of the original authors of SCORM and led the development of the IMS (now 1Edtech) elearning technology interoperability specifications. Additionally, in various executive roles, I have led the development of LCMS products and adopted e-learning systems, including ExactLS. I've known ExactLS - its technology and its leadership, for over 25 years.
In my opinion, it is the best LCMS on the market. I say this for several reasons:
1. Quality design of the product from a technical perspective: Useability, extensibility, and dynamic runtime rendering of content at scale is only possible with a well-thought-out architecture. The context of a review precludes me from going into detail, but suffice it to say that these are hard technical problems that ExactLS has been successful at achieving for as long as I have known about the product.
2. Extensibility: The product can be adapted for specific enterprise needs in a way that reduces maintenance and increases reusability.
3. Standards support - Exact was one of the first to support SCORM and IMS standards. Their team members participated in the formative discussions and writing of the standards.
4. Dynamic runtime rendering - The product is able to render content dynamically to multiple device types. This significantly reduces and eliminates the need to do pre-rendering and allows for dynamic content experiences requiring significantly less time during the authoring phase.
5. Powerful repository - An integrated repository of both "learning objects" as well as larger digital assets, such as pdf, etc, makes the authoring and reuse process seamless.
6. Speed at Scale - ExactLS has always had the ability to provide dynamic rendering even at high numbers of simultaneous end users. Few products are able to do this, and none have been doing so for as long as ExactLS has.
7. AI-ready/enabled - the Architecture of the product has allowed for the seamless introduction of AI capabilities.
As an example of a business value delivered by ExactLS in a real-world situation - I used it in doing a digital transformation of a category-leading publisher serving the parent and teacher market. The company had physical and digital products. This included many dozens and dozens of digital workbooks for mathematics across various student age ranges. With ExactLS, all of the products were able to be coded such that one set of code was used to create the workbooks' experience based on the characteristics of the student. e.g. age. The workbooks were dynamically rendered, thereby, eliminating the production process of pre-rendering all of the digital workbooks. Thus, if we needed to make a change, then the change became available immediately.
In another case, an existing bespoke elearning set of content was able to be converted using ExactLS from a narrow and limited deployment technology to a general web-delivery model at 1/10th of the original content's development costs.
In general, a great product and very knowledgeable staff enabling the delivery of significant business value for customers.
8 August 2024
Unprompted review