Flawless Migration from SumTotal to Cornerstone - Your Essential Playbook

SumTotal has long been a dominant force in enterprise and extended enterprise learning management, particularly favored by large organizations in healthcare, Life sciences, Manufacturing, and retail for its robust capabilities. While Cornerstone OnDemand acquired SumTotal a couple of years ago and continues to support existing SumTotal customers, the strategic focus for new functionality and cutting-edge AI capabilities is increasingly centered on the Cornerstone product line. This direction aligns with Cornerstone's overall product vision and where the majority of its customer base resides.

For customers like you, this shift presents a compelling case for migration. By moving to the core Cornerstone platform, you can directly leverage the latest innovations and AI-driven features as they are released.

During our time at Cornerstone Spark in May 2025, we connected with several customers who are concerned about the migration challenges they face. For large enterprises with scalable, multi-modal learning deployments or those heavily utilizing their LMS for extended enterprise training, migrating to Cornerstone is unequivocally the best path forward. The new Cornerstone Galaxy platform specifically unifies all your learning, skilling, and immersive experiences into a single, comprehensive bundle. This integration is designed to maximize value from your entire enterprise learning landscape.

Migrating an enterprise system, including your LMS, inherently presents distinct challenges and critical pain points. Drawing on extensive customer feedback, deep industry experience, and recurring concerns, we have developed this playbook to help you navigate and overcome many of these complexities with ease.

This guide is designed to empower organizations planning their migration to Cornerstone, providing a clear roadmap for effective execution and ensuring a seamless, impactful, and positive experience for all end-users.

Before you embark on this migration journey, it's vital to approach it with an open mind regarding your business processes. Be prepared to evaluate and potentially restructure or optimize them to leverage Cornerstone's capabilities for maximum advantage.

While both SumTotal and Cornerstone deliver similar core functionalities, their underlying structures, terminology, and workflows aren't identical. This migration is a prime opportunity to align your current processes with Cornerstone's strengths, rather than simply replicating old methods. Your implementation team will be invaluable in guiding you towards the optimal configuration of business processes within the new system.

Our team has developed an AI-powered data migration agent designed to revolutionize your migration experience. This agent intelligently analyzes, cleans, and migrates your data into Cornerstone with unparalleled ease, driving significant impact to your migration processes.

This migration effort is broadly categorized into seven phases

Phase – 0 - Deep Dive Evaluation and Strategic Alignment

Phase 1 – Planning and Budgeting

Phase 2 – Pre-Migration & Data Cleansing Phase

Phase 3: Data & Content Migration

Phase 4 - Implementation Phase – System Configuration

Phase 5 - User Acceptance Testing (UAT) & Validation

Phase 6 - Go Live

Phase 7 - Post Go-Live Sustenance & Continuous Optimization