SumTotal Systems, the world’s only unified learning, talent and workforce management solution, has announced a new release of its award-winning SumTotal Talent Expansion Suite®. The 18.2 release, which will be available in June, delivers exactly what users are looking for – Netflix™ style, consumer-led design, with a personalised experience to the individual’s learning and development requirements. This release further enhances SumTotal’s social offerings and delivers extended enterprise and mobile app innovations.
“This new consumer-led experience in SumTotal delivers on our promise to make the Talent Expansion Suite the most engaging and impactful learning platform on the market today. The new social platform enables more collaboration and streamlines communication which increases engagement productivity and innovation,” said Apratim Purakayastha, CTO of the Skillsoft Group. “Having completely renovated the platform over the past two years, we are now laser focused on delivering innovations throughout the Suite. These innovations, in conjunction with our extensive customer involvement in our product design process, as well as our revamp of Customer Success, make us a formidable force in the HCM market.”
New and Enhanced Features of SumTotal 18.2
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- New learner experience: incorporating a brand new, modern, consumer-oriented and learner-centric design into the latest release of SumTotal will increase content usage to help learners find and consume content that is essential to closing close critical skill gaps across an organisation. The new user experience is modelled after exhaustive research to deliver consumer-led experiences learners have come to expect in all aspects of their daily lives and also features cutting edge technology, a simple-to-use interface and super-fast search.
- Re-imagined social platform: this release delivers a completely re-engineered social platform. As organisational culture moves to a less hierarchical model, social collaboration becomes increasingly important. SumTotal Social enables customers to build communities, post blogs, start and respond to discussions, share files and plug in standard styles into workflows. SumTotal continues to support a Bring Your Own Social (BYOS) approach for organisations to integrate with marketing leading social platforms; an integration with Yammer™ was announced last year and more integrations are planned and in development with popular social platforms; Slack™ and Teams™.
- Exciting mobile enhancements: SumTotal is committed to a mobile-first design philosophy and the new Learner Experience and Social Platform are smartphone-optimised and included in the SumTotal 18.2 Mobile App. In addition to a UI designed for the phone form factor to increase employee engagement and productivity, SumTotal also leverages native mobile device capabilities, including allowing users to share pictures and videos from their phones directly to their social communities. The SumTotal Mobile App is available for Apple, Android and Microsoft including Surface and Windows 10 Laptops.
- Extended enterprise marketing tools: SumTotal Extended Enterprise gives customers control over the training they offer to external audiences and delivers flexibility in cost, currency, duration, cancellation methods and policies and bundles. This release extends the reach of your LMS with a rich set of new Extended Enterprise marketing tools, including email marketing campaign support to grow revenue by targeting your customer base to announce new offerings and upsell new learning. With this release you will have more flexibility than ever in how you package and bundle your content to create compelling learning bundles and channels. The new SumTotal Extended Enterprise capability will also offer greater flexibility in payment options by supporting a virtual currency in the form of tokens making it much easier to support a global audience.
- Enhanced skillsoft content experience: the learner experience in this release is further optimised for Skillsoft content with Percipio Content Services. Using rich APIs, Percipio Content Services will enable SumTotal customers to access channel curation, multiple modalities, courses, videos and books to show through in a best-in-class manner. In addition, it provides dynamic content curation, competency alignment, and value-based reporting. This experience is only available for Skillsoft content.
- Redesigned Rule Manager – this release delivers a completely redesigned and updated Rule Manager in SumTotal Workforce Management. The Rule Manager is the engine that drives customers’ configured business rules for accurate processing of employees’ time and attendance, scheduling and absence management. The new Rule Manager allows for drag and drop prioritisation and enhanced sequencing of rules and rulesets. This enhancement is the first delivery of a multi-release update of the powerful administrative configuration module of SumTotal Workforce Management and will allow increased customer self-service and faster deployments.
“SumTotal continues to innovate in the HCM space. It’s new learner experience will enable enhanced engagement that should drive increased usage,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst at Aragon Research. “Additionally, their revamped social platform puts social learning front and centre and also enables integration with third-party platform providers.”
