How Does Automation In TalentLMS Ease Workloads, For Real?
Automation is a big, and often scary, discussion subject in the modern world. With self-driving-cars, assembly robots, intelligent software, and all kinds of innovations coming in, people are understandably concerned about the impact of automation on employment. When it comes to automation in TalentLMS, however, there are plenty of features that are not there to take your job, but to make it easier. And in this article, we’ll see how...
1. No Installation Required...
TalentLMS is the quintessential turn-key (or, rather, enter-password) solution: It’s always running on the Cloud, and all it takes to get started with it is to create a new account and log in.
As TalentLMS is a Cloud-based platform, it requires no infrastructure in your datacenter, no installation, and no IT degree to get it running.
2. ...And No Maintenance Either
Not only is installation taken care of for you, but maintenance is also automatic. It’s not that TalentLMS doesn’t take backups, upgrades and security fixes ― it does all of those things. But instead of your IT team sweating over them, and often getting them wrong, TalentLMS has its own expert dev-ops team that takes care of all that behind the scenes.
3. Scales Automatically
The same free eLearning portal account that’s there for you to evaluate TalentLMS (which, by the way, is powerful enough to cover the training needs of very small teams of up to five people), can, at any time, be switched to one of TalentLMS several paid plans, offering painless scaling as your needs grow.
4. Defaults That Make Sense
While TalentLMS’ configuration is not totally automatic, its defaults have been built with a preference for convention over configuration, which translates to fewer things to configure, and more settings that work out of the box, so you can focus on your training program.
And even what you do need to configure, has lots of hidden logic behind it, that automates all kinds of complex tasks, and presents you with the absolutely minimum of choices that you need to make.
For example, configuring TalentLMS for eCommerce takes no more than a couple of pieces of information (payment gateway API key, etc.).
5. Integrations That Just Work
In a similar vein, whether native or through meta-integrator Zapier, TalentLMS integrations just work ― and require only very basic configuration from your part.
Take the platform’s support for third-party video conference solutions, for example: You just need to configure which one you want to use and add your access keys, and they automatically work as if they were native to the platform.
And speaking of Zapier, TalentLMS’ Zapier actions and triggers let you automate all kinds of integrations and complex workflows, and make TalentLMS communicate and work with over 4000 apps and services, from Gmail and MailChimp to Trello and Facebook.
6. Compatible With (Almost) Anything You Throw At It
Some software is very picky about what kind of file formats it accepts. Not TalentLMS. Thank’s to its proprietary EncodeMagic engine, you can import almost any kind of document, office, or multimedia file in common use, and TalentLMS will automatically convert it to an eLearning-compatible format.
7. Mass Actions
Perhaps the most obvious support for automation in TalentLMS comes in the form of Mass Actions ― a feature that eliminates all kinds of repetitive grunt work (like enrolling students to a course), by letting you operate across many TalentLMS entities (users, groups, courses, lessons, etc.) at once.
8. Events Engine
Another clear example of automation in action in TalentLMS would be the Events engine, that takes care of Notifications and triggered Actions.
If you’re not familiar with it, it basically allows TalentLMS administrators to set up various trigger rules (such as "upon a course’s completion") and have TalentLMS automatically notify various interested parties (through Notifications), or perform some administrative task (through Actions).
9. Assessments Engine
Even testing becomes easier with TalentLMS, as you can create your own question pools on various subjects (and of multiple question types) and use them to generate tests and quizzes on the fly.
10. Reporting Made Easy
While TalentLMS offers extensive custom reporting capabilities, allowing you to create your own reports, we are especially proud of what you get out of the box: A large collection of built-in reports about everything within your eLearning environment, including a timeline of all system actions that lets you assess what happened, by whom and when.
Heck, TalentLMS will even create nice, detailed, infographics with data about your eLearning program, for you.
11. REST API
Apart from the behind-the-scenes automation in TalentLMS, or the one you can configure to do things for you (like Actions), there’s also a full-blown REST API on offer, that your IT department (or anybody with basic coding skills) can use to automate various aspects of TalentLMS works, and have it integrate with legacy or third-party systems.
Conclusion
In this post, we had a look at TalentLMS’ in-your-face and behind-the-scenes automation options, and explored all kinds of automation touches, that while not always obvious, are there to make your job as a training administrator or instructor, easier.
Of course, those features are just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to TalentLMS, and, until our jobs are automated away, we’ll be covering even more of them from these pages. Stay tuned!
