Challenges in SumTotal SkillSoft Integration

SkillSoft is the leading provider of off-the-shelf learning content, and SumTotal is a popular vendor of learning management systems. Together, they use an Open Learning Services Architecture (OLSA) integration to standardize and simplify how SumTotal organizes SkillSoft learning content. OLSA handles the administrative tasks required to align activity types, create the library hierarchy, and organize prefixing and suffixing activity names and codes.

Complex business requirements and large content libraries can make organizing content libraries difficult. The purpose of the integration standard is to manage the unique complexity of each set of business needs without requiring customization of your LMS.

Technical Requirements

Using the SkillSoft OLSA requires working knowledge of web services, AICC, SOAP, HTTP, and HTTPS. SkillSoft provides a complete OLSA integration guide to clients.

There are some specific use cases you need to be aware of when you are working with the SumTotal-SkillSoft integration. If these use cases apply to your organization, you will need to build the solutions into your project plan.

Special Use Cases in SkillSoft-SumTotal Integration

• Decentralized Global Organization. A decentralized organization’s separate business units will often have different contracts and licensing models or use different SkillSoft sites. Organizing libraries and audiences can be a challenge because there is no custom segmentation in SkillSoft. If you want the SkillSoft activities to be targeted based on the user’s organization, you will need to configure the integration to segment the libraries for your users.
• Merging SkillSoft Content into the Library. Most organizations have several content providers and produce at least some content in-house. Organizing SkillSoft content with these various libraries can be a challenge. The OLSA integration has a catalog hierarchy tool that enables you to define a custom hierarchy to give learners and administrators a transparent and seamless experience.
• Removing Retired Content: As SkillSoft updates its content, it introduces new content and retires obsolete activities. Your integration will need to determine if learners are using retired activities and whether there is a replacement, then notify your administrators so they can take action. Here are the steps required to handle retired content.

1.  A nightly job pulls the content and library information for SkillSoft site.
2. The procedure reviews the catalog mapping file to organize the SkillSoft content into the categories you have defined.
3. The procedure checks for retired content and captures information for registered users and the status of      the activity for each user. It then pushes a custom report to administrators.
4. If the retired activity does not have registrations, the procedure creates a data file for processing into            SumTotal using TMU to deactivate the learning activity.
5. Activities are assigned categories, subcategories, metadata, content types and audiences in a flat file that will be used by SumTotal TMU to process into SumTotal.

OLSA integration will allow you to configure your business rules to align your SkillSoft catalogs to your business needs. The effort is well spent in reducing the administrative burdens of library maintenance.

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