Leverage eFrontPro For The Enterprise: The Case Of IT
When I was a kid, I always wanted a nice red Swiss Army knife. You know the thing -- the folding knife in bright red that had half a dozen, or more, tools stowed inside it. In hindsight, I’m not so sure what use I’d have for a beer opener or a corkscrew. I wouldn’t be legally allowed to drink alcohol for another decade. Or what exactly I’d do with a nail file or a tiny screwdriver. I guess the whole thing just looked cool.
Nowadays, it’s usually things in the digital domain that fit the same role in our lives -- but much more substantially this time. Like your smartphone, which serves as a camera + camcorder + game console + music player + portable browser + many other things.
Or eFrontPro, this veritable Swiss Army knife of a platform, with numerous tools and features to handle all kinds of use cases, from Talent Development to Onboarding.
And with this long-winded introduction, I commence this series of posts on the different ways you can use eFrontPro for your enterprise and the tools it provides to fit each particular use case. Starting with....
eFrontPro For Enterprise IT
You’d think that a piece of software should solve the problem it was designed for, and you’d be right. But that’s not enough. In fact, that’s just the beginning.
See, all kinds of software can solve a particular problem, more or less successfully. That doesn’t automatically make them something that you would want in your enterprise data center. For example, would you adopt a database that’s great for storing your data, but is not totally secure, and doesn’t work with your team’s programming languages of choice? Me neither.
Besides doing its job well, an enterprise tool should also play well in an enterprise environment. And eFrontPro does. In fact, it has been developed from the start (based on our experience with its older sibling, eFront) to play great it an enterprise environment.
Hosting Flexibility
While many organizations have made the leap to Cloud hosting and third party IaaS and SaaS, others are still hesitant or have serious and valid reasons to prefer the tight control of their infrastructure in their own datacenters.
eFrontPro can accommodate both preferences, as it comes in both a self-hosted version, as well as a Managed Private Cloud offering.
Both versions can be fully customizable with your own branding and settings, and while the former offers you total freedom and control, the latter gives you ease-of-mind with automatic updates, monitoring, and backups.
Single-Sign-On
It’s neither convenient nor prudent, from a security perspective, to have your users fumble with several different usernames and passwords for different services.
That’s why it’s important for enterprise software to support several Single-Sign-On (or SSO, for short) standards so that it can automatically validate user credentials against your central authorization server, whichever that may be. eFrontPro comes with built-in support for all major SSO standards, including vanilla LDAP, Active Directory, Facebook login, and several others through SAML 2.0.
Customizable
eFrontPro lets you use your own domain and logo, create your own themes (or pick between several built-in ones), and add your own CSS styles or your own Javascript to be executed when your Talent Development portal loads.
But these options are just for the visual part. Through eFrontPro’s flexible yet easy to use management system, you can model your organization in any way you want, divide your talent into Groups and Audiences, categorize your courses in a hierarchical taxonomy, and even create your own User Types and extend the user information it keeps through Extended Profiles.
Branchable
Enterprises, especially larger ones, usually consist of several different departments and facilities. In the case of multinationals, this even includes facilities and subsidiaries all over the globe.
And while you could try to use a single Talent Development portal for all of them, it’s more convenient to be able to create as many independent portals as you want, each with their own branding, users, courses, language and timezone settings (which would obviously differ between your US and Chinese offices).
eFrontPro lets you do just this, through its Branches feature. Branches are independent, fully functional Talent Development and training portals, that can be created and controlled from a single eFrontPro installation.
Reporting Back To You
Bosses and managers love reports. And not without reason -- a well-done report can give you a lot of insight on a subject in very few pages.
eFrontPro contains a fully customizable reporting system that you can use to get insight into the progress of your Talent Development program, particular training session, or the overall progress of some user or group of users. All in easy to understand tables and charts, and easily exportable in Excel-compatible CSV format.
Integratable
We already covered how eFrontPro can integrate with your authentication services through various SSO protocols.
But that’s not all. Through its dozens of native integration options, and even more through the Zapier integration broker (which piles on a few thousand more integrations on top of the native ones), eFrontPro can talk to almost any third party software and service you can throw at it.
And when it comes to connecting it to something exotic, or your legacy mid-seventies COBOL server, it also offers a full-blown extension API (in PHP) that can be used to make it talk to anything that can communicate through a network or read and write to disk. And if REST is more up your alley, there’s also a RESTful API (with accompanying SDK) to leverage for your integrations.
The Gist Of eFrontPro For The Enterprise
In this post, we had a look at the enterprise-related options and features that eFrontPro provides. Stay tuned for upcoming posts in this series, to see how eFrontPro is flexible enough to cater to many different business cases, from Social Business and Talent Development to the Extended Enterprise and even commercial eLearning.
