Sneak peak: what’s in store for eFront in 2015
When Steve Jobs first introduced OS X he said it would be the foundation for the next ten years of Mac OS. While some classic Mac OS users complained about a few changes compared to how the old OS operated, OS X was proven not only a stable platform for Apple to build upon, but also something that brought in ten times as many users as Mac OS classic had.
eFront is like our OS X.
It’s a rethinking of eFront, created from scratch with modern technologies and with us pouring in all the experience and wisdom that supporting eFront users gave us over the years.
Some small things might be missing, and a few features might behave differently (or, according to most of our testers and early adopter users, better), but more importantly it’s a vastly improved platform to build upon.
That is, eFront 1.0 was just the beginning.
Already in early December 2014, very shortly after the official launch of the new version, we brought you its first point update, bringing several new features (and squashing several bugs and annoyances that you reported).
It weren’t small stuff either. Some of the features were quite big for such a quickly released update, including:
1) The ability to conduct surveys and collect results automatically through eFront.
2) Video-conference support leveraging BigBlueButton’s or Cisco’s WebEx video-conference tools, including the ability to save a video-conference for later replay.
3) 10 new, professionally created, themes to chose from
4) Excel compatible file export, for those of you swearing by (as opposed at) MS Office.
5) A REST based API to hook and integrate external services with.
Since then we didn’t stop working on improving eFront (well, we stopped a couple of days to celebrate Christmas and the New Year, but who didn’t?).
We have been quite busy working on the next bunch of features. Which might not be ready yet, but will soon(-ish) be available to an eFront installation near you. Until then we can give a little teaser for what we’re working on in our labs:
1) Enhancements in offline learning.
eFront already supports offline content as is, leveraging HTML5’s capabilities. But just accessing your e-learning content offline is not enough, so we’re working in adding 2 side synchronization, so that changes you’ve made (edits, tests taken etc) can be synced back to the LMS when you’re back online (and vice versa).
2) Stripe Support
eFront is flexible enough to cover most e-commerce needs with features such as Balances, Discounts and Price Tracks. Until now though, your only payment option was PayPal. In our labs we’re working on adding support for Stripe, the popular payment processor that has taken the payments world by storm.
3) More tools for organizing your content
eFront is all about organizing, querying and structuring your content in any way you want, with our powerful rules, filters and organizational entities such as Audiences and Locations. In the upcoming release we’ll be adding a new entity type called Curriculum, allowing to group courses in a bigger entity and apply rules to all of them.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of course, as we’re also busy with all kinds of improvements and features that we can’t announce yet. Let’s just say 2015 is gonna be an exciting year for eFront users.
How do you feel about those upcoming features? Anything else you’d like to say? Don’t be shy, drop as a line in the comments ― building features based on customer requests is what we’re here for.
