It is a long weekend for us here in Canada (Happy Thanksgiving!) and also for those lucky enough in the U.S. to get Columbus Day off on Monday. Perfect time for a new release of our LMS — so we deployed Version 2.12 last night.
This one took a little longer than usual to get out the door, but hopefully, it will prove to be worth the wait. We upgraded some of our infrastructure in the process, so we needed to be extra careful to make sure that everything works smoothly. Along with several bug fixes, there are over 20 new features. Here are the highlights:
Custom domains
We offer our service as a white-label solution. When you offer our LMS to your clients, we want it to appear as if you made it. You control the branding and the terminology used. Your clients see your contact support information and the system can be customized so that emails are sent from your organization.
The final step to completely hide Firmwater from view was to allow you to use your own custom domain. We had done this for a few of our larger clients but it wasn’t easy for us to manage this across a large number of clients. Now we can offer it to everybody.
You can now choose to use your own domain. So, instead of sending out addresses to your clients with ‘`lms.firmwater.com`’, you can use a URL such as:
‘`lms.yourcompany.com`’ or ‘`portal.yourcompany.com`’ (or whatever you’d like).
Note that there is an additional monthly charge to make use of a custom domain. This requires some setup on our part and we incur additional costs to purchase an SSL certificate for your domain and for dedicated IP addresses.
If you’re interested, or for more details, please contact us.
Simpler login URLs
Upgrading our infrastructure has given us some additional capabilities that we didn’t have before. We’ve now been able to simplify the addresses of your login page and those of your clients (the old addresses still work too). You can now just tack on your client ID to the domain used.
If your client’s ID is ‘`yourclient`’, their login page can now be accessed at ‘`lms.firmwater.com/yourclient`’. (Previously, you would have to use ‘`https://lms.firmwater.com/lms/?cid=yourclient`’.)
This works if you’re using a custom domain as well. Your client’s login page would be accessed at ‘`lms.yourcompany.com/yourclient`’.
Improved reporting
Reporting now uses an updated platform, allowing for better support from all browsers and, in many cases, improved report execution times. Users will no longer experience application time outs while interacting with reports for long periods of time. We’ve also organized the list of reports into menus to make it easier to find similar reports.
Along with making improvements to several of the existing reports, we also added two new reports:
Interaction Data Report: Export of the SCORM interaction data saved per user attempt. Some content saves question response data to the LMS through this mechanism.
Location List: Lists all locations and the number of users for each.
Other new features and enhancements
A few more of the new features and enhancements include:
- Support for taxes when making purchases through the LMS.
- Importing of locations, departments, job titles.
- An improved file upload interface.
We hope you enjoy all the new features.