Content Controller 4.1 – Adapting to match adoption

Around here we use the phrase ‘match pace and style’ a lot when working with our customers (or soon to be customers). This applies whether it’s a contract negotiation or support request, we find ways to make the experience as delightful as possible for us both. You need 2 weeks to review the contract? Great, we’ll follow up then or go faster if you come back early. If you prefer to talk on the phone, we have a support line that is easy to find on our site to call us.

The same ethos carries over into how we approach product development. We want to be sure our products evolve to meet the needs of our customers. Content Controller is a great example of how it’s adapted over the years to handle the challenges of distributed training models at scale. With Content Controller 4.1, we’ve introduced two new features that do just that and help to make CC a more integrated component of your learning ecosystem.

Content Portal – helping our customers match pace with their customers

This is a biggie! Inspired by customer needs, we are introducing Content Portal to help further streamline the work of sharing content across multiple LMSs. By design, Content Controller helps offload the content administration burden to keep up with content versioning and updates. But another administration pain point emerged as customers scaled up. If you’re adding a lot of courses to your catalog and adding more accounts- just keeping up with sharing new files to those customers can start to pile up.

Content Portal lets our customers set their own pace with their clients. With this new feature, our customers have the power to create customizable web portals for each of their accounts. This lets their clients come to them when they’re ready for new content. The benefits here are twofold- by enabling self-service, Content Controller customers gain some time back now with no need to manually share files as more courses are added. In turn, their customers have a place to pick up the latest courses at their time of need- rather than getting lost in the inbox.

Custom IDs – Matching pace with other systems

We also look for ways our products can integrate with the tools and applications around them. This means introducing things like APIs and Webhooks to help make our products an integral part of the products and ecosystems around them.

New in Content Controller 4.1, customers can now set custom IDs for both Courses (including bundles and equivalents) and Accounts. What does that mean? If you use CC in conjunction with other platforms (think authoring tools or a CRM), often those applications have unique identifiers for your content and accounts. It simplifies third-party software integration by enabling direct ID matching, removing the need for ID translation between systems.

We’re excited for this chapter of Content Controller and the features the 4.1 release offers. Adding the Content Portal feature is a really big step forward, and we’re eager to see where our customers take it. And if you want to peek inside the product development process that happened behind the scenes to bring this feature to the world, stay tuned for next week’s blog from Ryan Sunde to hear how we tackled this from a product management perspective.

Can’t wait until then to talk about these new features? Reach out, and we’ll walk you through them.