Nathan, on the other hand, is jumping onto Team Delight to help with supporting our customers. Team Delight’s main goal is to dazzle our customers with great support, and we think Nathan is a wonderful addition to the team. There’s a lot more to Nathan than his way with customers, so head over here to learn more.

We are so excited to welcome Nathan and Ervin to our team, and we’re always on the lookout for more awesome folks just like them to join us. Check out this blog post to get an idea of who we are looking for. Who knows, we could be welcoming you next

The post A big welcome! appeared first on SCORM - .

It was almost three years ago when ADL asked the e-learning community to help them with research to create a new, simpler, more powerful e-learning standard. E-learning standards are what we do, so of course we jumped at the opportunity.

The result was Project Tin Can, which resulted in the Tin Can API. We wrote the first version of the API, version 0.8, then handed it over to ADL and a vibrant open community.

Today it looks like a few guys in Nashville, TN (and a few stragglers up North) managed to transform our slice of the world.

Learning isn’t going to be tracked the same way that it has been. You want to know more about learners than just “someone completed a course” or “someone scored 98% on an test”. You want to be able to track activities that take place outside of an LMS, like serious games, mobile apps, group projects, conferences, simulations and so much more. You want to be able to correlate real-world performance with training data. And, you want all of this learning and performance data to live in one system.

The Tin Can API makes all of this a reality.

Already about 60 products/companies have adopted beta versions of the spec. Now is the time when the rest of the industry joins in.

The post The World Just Changed appeared first on SCORM - .

Why the cross-domain limitation, and how can you get around it?

Basically, SCORM requires that content be served from the same domain as the LMS API. Browsers intentionally prevent the javascript in the content from communicating with the SCORM API if they originate from different domains. This is intentional on the part of the browser makers because it’s a security risk.

If you control both domains (content and LMS), then this security risk shouldn’t be a particular concern to you, but that’s not easy to convey to everyone’s browsers. There are several ways to deal with cross-domain situations, all of which have downsides.

• Alter the settings in every browser that will play content. (This is a bad idea.)
• Manipulate document.domain in each piece of content. (Also not a good idea, because the content vendors have to be involved. Any solution that requires cooperation on the part of the content and LMS vendors basically defeats the purpose of a standard like SCORM.)
• Use Tin Can, because it works via web services. (Good idea long term, but it doesn’t solve your current problem of playing SCORM content.)
• Manipulate this via networking magic.
• Make each additional machine appear to come from the same domain. You can run multiple SCORM Engine installations in a single domain, essentially behind a load balancer.
• You could even go so far as to have something like http://scorm.domain.com/customerA and http://scorm.domain.com/customerB if you wanted different content stores for each of them, with each communicating back to http://scorm.domain.com. These would be virtual directories that are housed on different machines (with content in each) but appear to come from the same domain. This requires some skill in proxies. (Note: This wouldn’t work if you asked for http://customerA.domain.com, http://customerB.comain.com communicating with http://engine.domain.com. That would require central/remote, listed below.)
• You can also do a lot of funny business down in apache with redirect forwards, virtual hosts, etc and make those domains look however you want to the outside browser.
• Use what we call a central/remote architecture.
• This is a great solution to the problem, and something we’ve built out well in SCORM Engine. It does, however, carry an extra cost because it requires reintegration and is explicitly excluded in our SCORM Engine contracts.
• Basically, this allows you to have a single core Engine installation. You then replicate the remote component at each content store, wherever that might be. You would be responsible for replicating the content files to those locations. We would collectively write logic that determines which of the remote locations should play the content for each user.

So, there are options. They generally require extra work and extra costs. If you’d like to discuss these options, just get in touch with us. Ask us anything, really.

The post Solving the SCORM Cross Domain Issue appeared first on SCORM - .

It’s been an especially fun year with a great group of people. I’m honored to work with one of the smartest and most entertaining groups of people I’ve ever come across. I honestly look forward to coming to work every morning. We’re hiring more six people right now, come join us.

Speaking of a great year. Exciting things are happening with the Tin Can API. This blog on scorm.com has been pretty quiet of late, but we haven’t gone away. Most of our efforts are going into the blog over on tincanapi.com. Go check it out and sign up for our Tin Can newsletter that we send out every month.

The post Four for Four appeared first on SCORM - .

Most people that I see in my day-to-day life only see what I wear, and that usually includes what Jena and I refer to as “a good ol’ pair of jeans.”

A good pair of jeans is a wonderful thing. If you’ve ever found the perfect pair for you, then you know exactly what I mean.

Finding good jeans used to be a real struggle for me. I knew what I wanted, but I just couldn’t make it happen. I finally found my process, and it was well worth the wait.

My wife, Ashlee, knows how to pick out the best jeans. Sounds un-manly, but I’m not one to deny a good process once I find it. About once a year, I sit in the fitting room and she throws 3-4 pairs to me. Two of them are perfect. I buy them, and I wear them out.

Now, the perfect pair, right off the shelf might still need some work. I’m okay with spending a pretty penny on the perfect pair, then getting them tailored to the perfect length. I’ll wear these jeans a lot. It’s worth taking the time to make sure that they’re exactly how I want them.

Why is this important? Because every day I come in contact with loads of people that I don’t talk to, but they’re people that still sum me up only on the basis of how I appear to them.

This analogy, for Rustici Software, is like having over 2,000 unique people walk past us on the sidewalk every day and make snap judgements about us based on what they see.

…except in our case, it’s unique visitors to our websites.

It’s worth it to take the time to tailor our sites to be perfect for our company — our sites are how we’re judged by those 2,000 people that pass us every day on the sidewalk.

Just like the perfect pair of jeans isn’t measured only by the perfect inseam, the perfect color or the perfect placement of the pockets, a website is much more than just design. Are you telling a story with your site? Are you keeping things interesting for those that visit your site? Are you creating flashy things that just get in the way of who you are?

Our goal is to create sites that are transparent and helpful. Sites that don’t waste the time of our visitors. Sites that say “just by looking at our blue jeans, you can tell that we’ve done the work to make sure that you’re getting helpful, accurate information — we’re here to help, and we’re not here to waste your time.”

No matter how much time and effort it takes, we don’t need bedazzled fanciness, we just need what’s right for us and for our customers.

To see our latest fitting, check out TinCanAPI.com. Tin Can is the next generation of SCORM, and we’ve spent a lot of time trying to make it easy for you to understand.

The post A good pair of jeans… appeared first on SCORM - .

If you’re the right person for any of these positions, come have some fun and change the world with us.

Software Developer
We’re always looking for amazing software developers and we’ll probably hire as many as we can get our hands on over the next few months.

Quality Ombudsman
We’re looking for a particularly anal-retentive form of geek to push us to use best practices, ensure we’re testing the right things with every release and squash bugs with vengeance.

UX Designer / Ombudsman
We’re a bunch of developers who think we can do design, but we don’t do a good job. We need a pro. A tireless advocate for the end user, an advocate for simplicity, an advocate for taste and elegance.

Start here for more information about these jobs and why Rustici Software is the best place you will ever work.

The post We’re Hiring – Come Build the Future With Us appeared first on SCORM - .

Recently we had a customer that uses SCORM Cloud Dispatch ask us if there was a way to control how many people were accessing their course from the Client LMS. At the time there wasn’t — but you know what? It’s a great idea. So, we added some functionality that lets you set just how many users can access your course from a Client LMS. (See how it works here). Why did we add this? Because someone asked and it made sense for that customer and many others.

We love having these conversations because it helps us understand how people use our products and how we can make them more useful.

Lesson learned? It never hurts to ask. We’re listening and welcome the requests and feedback.  Send them our way!

The post We’re All Ears appeared first on SCORM - .

We’re going to wait a little while to figure that out, and during that time, externally-generated Tin Can statements will remain free. For example, statements that originate from our Tin Can bookmarklet will be stored at no cost.

At this point, we commit to keep externally generated Tin Can statements free of charge until the formal release of Tin Can from ADL (currently rumored for the end of Q1 2013).

One key distinction is that if you use SCORM Cloud to import a Tin Can package and then assign that course to a user via SCORM Cloud or one of its plugins, you will consume a registration, and registrations cost money. For pricing purposes, we treat Tin Can packages just like SCORM packages.

Our best guess is that as we move beyond the formal release of Tin Can next year, we will probably base our pricing around the number of users for whom you report statements on. We want you to collect a huge pile of statements this year. We want you to collect a huge pile of statements going into the future. More Tin Can statements will make Tin Can more effective, and it will allow us to better support our users. We will find a reasonable way to relate the utility of those statements to your costs. At this point, though, we still feel it’s too early to specify that pricing.

The post Pricing Tin Can in the Cloud appeared first on SCORM - .

So instead of bothering the people around here with my chatter, I’ve decided to make my talkative nature more productive. I’m taking my talking to the Cloud. You can now chat with me LIVE about all things SCORM Cloud Monday – Friday. I’m usually around my desk from about 9am- 5pm Central time. I wish I could be available all the time, but hey, a girl’s gotta sleep sometime, right?

That should give us enough time each day to talk about all the awesome things SCORM Cloud can do and hopefully, I’ll be able to help answer some questions along the way. Each chat will generate a support ticket with us, so if you need to follow up or have other questions, our support staff is there to help you out.

You can find me hanging out in the Help button on the SCORM Cloud support page. It looks like this….

So pop on over and chat me, maybe? It’s awfully lonely in there without you.

The post Chat me, maybe? appeared first on SCORM - .

On the surface it’s lighthearted, but you know what, I really care. Actually, I care a whole helluva lot.

It’s not about the toilet paper (we’re all smart enough to look before we sit), it’s about an attitude that cuts straight to the core of who we are and where I want to work.

Changing the roll is just one of those things that needs to get done. It’s not anybody’s responsibility. It’s not in anyone’s job description, but its just gotta happen. Somebody’s gotta do it.

The person who replaces the TP is the person who is going to answer a customer’s question about something well beyond the scope of what we do, just to help them out.

The person who takes out the overflowing trash can is the person who is going to make a quick bug fix, even if that code technically belongs to another team.

The person who puts a stray glass in the dishwasher is the person who will take 20 minutes to help a struggling peer, despite an overflowing to-do list of his own.

A company filled with people who change the toilet paper is a company that delights its customers. It’s a company that respects its employees. It’s a company that can avoid a lot of structure, process, management and unnecessary BS because amazing people are filling in the cracks. A company that changes the TP, doesn’t have to fill out TPS Reports.

The post Want a Great Place to Work? Change the Toilet Paper appeared first on SCORM - .