Endless Possibilities

Both the CMS and the LMS systems are designed to be flexible and support a great many features. Some are very specific in that a specific manager tool has been created to accomplish a particular set of functionality.  Others are designed so that you can accomplish a variety of things with a single tool and maybe even exploit certain features for very different purposes. 

So then how do you learn it all? Like most things this is best done one step at a time. 

• Learn some background and concepts
• Learn the basics
• Identify the features you need and learn how to manage the related content

Reading all of our documentation start to finish would never get you to where you need to be.  After you have gone through the steps detailed in our Getting Started page you should really just tackle one concept at a time and learn new things at your own pace.  

Understand that the programmers want you to be successful and endeavored to make the tools as intuitive as they could but often complexity accompanies power and it just can't be avoided.  When you find a feature that you need to learn try not to be intimidated by the number of options presented or how busy the screen may be.  Each item is labelled but in a busy screen there may not be enough room to give a complete explanation. This is where tooltips can come in. If you put your mouse over an item hover for a moment it may have a tooltip and offer a more detailed explanation. 

It might be useful to also realize that we never really expect you to have to learn a sequence of actions to accomplish something. Our indent is that you need to learn where to start but after that present some meaningful options to guide you so that you can accomplish the goals that the tool is intended to facilitate. Memorizing a sequence of steps to accomplish something you will do frequently is never a recipe for success.  

Both the CMS and the LMS have multiple configuration tools that setup the way various features look or which options may be available etc.  Not every administrator will have access to these tools but generally every site will have a main administrator that does have access to these tools. Some tools are for site design and your site designer may be the only one with that access because these tools are very advanced and required some knowledge of CSS or HTML or possibly even some database skills.  

Many of these tools are designed to be set once and then largely never accessed again but if you can't find what you are looking for by searching the course contents on this site then feel free to contact your site designer with your query.  

Some tools have their own setup or configuration or preferences or sometimes all three options.  These are generally located in the auxiliary menu (if there is one) in the status bar of the management tool listing screen. Look for a  icon and if present clicking on that icon the auxiliary menu will be displayed assuming you have access privileges for configuration.  

Sadly, there is no single tool (yet) to search all content pages as well as all LMS course content so there is no single way to search this documentation site simply to find what you are looking for.  The best way to search for help is to assume that it is documented in a course and so look for the courses under either the CMS or the LMS menus and select the appropriate option.  Then from the Course Contents enter what you are looking for into the Search in Course box and click on the  icon.  Each page including the keys you entered will then be displayed.  

Probably the most important thing to understand is a concept we frequently reiterate in this documentation: we consider the CMS to be a management tool for our customers and feel that the bulk of the design and even much of the structure creation is best done by one of our designers.  While we do this using the same tools you may have access to they are considered more advanced and either require some special skills or may just not be well documented.