Lower prices resulting from new content creation process causes a stir in the MicroStation training world.

Clearwater, Florida, USA — Axiom, the world’s most experienced developer of time-saving MicroStation software solutions, has now become the largest provider of web-based training courses for Bentley software. Axiom reached two milestones this month, which demonstrates the great demand for its online MicroStation training.

With over 100 courses completed, representing over 8,000 pages of training materials, technical illustrations and videos, Axiom now provides more complete, on-demand courses for Bentley customers than anyone on the planet.

Quantity of e-learning course content for Bentley products
The first milestone reached this month is the record number of on-demand, e-learning courses available. With over one hundred courses completed — representing over 8,000 pages of training materials, technical illustrations and videos for MicroStation, GEOPAK® and Micro-soft® Office — Axiom now provides more on-demand learning course content for Bentley customers than anyone on the planet.

“What makes our content unique,” says Mike Arroyo, the world-renowned MicroStation evangelist and Axiom’s Vice President for Learning, “is that all our web pages can be edited with simple editors, such as Notepad and Paintbrush.” All companies now have the opportunity to insert their own best practices, custom programs and corporate workflow into on-demand, e-learning course pages for Bentley products, without having to do any complicated programming.

Record sales of MicroStation e-learning courses
The second milestone reached this month was Axiom’s record sales of learning products. At press time, 155 companies (and growing) are training 7,500 employees using LearningBay Professional, Axiom’s learning management system. LearningBay Professional is the software platform that provides access to the over one hundred online courses currently organized into fifteen MicroStation, GEOPAK and Microsoft® Office training libraries (a “library” is a large collection of courses on a major subject). LearningBay Professional tracks all student activity and progress, including test scores and course assignments. What’s more, you can obtain all this learning now for less cost than anything else out there.

Reduced pricing
Axiom recently released a new, low pricing structure that should ensure its continued reign as the fastest-growing MicroStation e-learning provider. The actual price for a given company depends on a number of factors such as the number of seats of MicroStation. You’ll have to call Axiom to get a precise quote for your exact needs and situation. Suffice to say that you’ll probably be very pleasantly surprised to find out how the new pricing structure works.

“We have garnered some of the planet’s most-skilled CAD talent and have created a machine that produces quality learning content rapidly and inexpensively,” said Axiom President, Ed Clark. “As it has always been our goal to give more than expected, we are now passing this advantage on to our loyal customers.”

Customize MicroStation training content to your exact needs and own — not just lease — the results.

One of the beautiful things about the new pricing structure is how easy it is for a company to buy MicroStation training content, rather than lease it on an annual basis. This ability to buy MicroStation training content plus the ability to easily modify the content for your company’s particular workflows and practices is unique to LearningBay. Now you can customize MicroStation training content for your exact needs and own that content forever — without having to pay annual fees for the content you modified. Of course, you can still custom modify content you lease from Axiom and you can buy content from Axiom without modifying it. These abilities — whether you exercise them individually or in combination — are offered to the MicroStation community only by Axiom.

MicroStation users winning with LearningBay
Customers have reported universal success with Axiom’s learning products. Below are just a few examples:
A new MicroStation user commented, “Since receiving your training… I have managed to complete my first project using MicroStation from beginning to end. I definitely could not have done that without having your training.” — A.T.

Here’s one from an experienced MicroStation professional: “[One of our users] stated that he had already learned more from the V8 Essentials on the LearningBay than he learned in his tech school CADD course.” — T.D.

A CAD Administrator said, “Right now I have 57 students enrolled and I am happy to say they are enthusiastic and enjoyed the course. I can say that LearningBay is very helpful and has been a good investment for our company. It has saved us an ample amount of money by not having to send each of these students to instructor-led MicroStation training.” — D.C.

What Axiom offers is unique.
In addition to the massive content and low price, Axiom’s on-demand learning is also distinguished by the ease with which you can modify it for your exact needs. Drop any paragraph, page, interactive tutorial, graphic or even a whole course into any customized training course you develop for your specific CAD work flows and standards. Or start with our courses and make changes, large or small, to suit the exact needs of your organization. Change the sequence in which actions are done. Add your organization’s logo to every page if you want. Axiom’s LearningBay is the world’s only solution that gives you the power to quickly and easily customize your organization’s MicroStation and GEOPAK training to your exact needs.

Axiom’s learning is expanding at unprecedented rates, but in the end it’s MicroStation users who win. Check out the new website, www.LearningBay.com, to learn how you can “test drive” learning solutions, enroll in web courses, schedule live demonstrations and request learning quotes.

What’s next?
So, what’s next for Axiom? According to Mike Arroyo, a planned, massive expansion to the current course offerings in 2007, with scheduled releases of hundreds of new CAD classes. These include the much-anticipated InRoads libraries for V8.5, V8.9 and V8 XM, as well as additional MicroStation courses such as a V8 XM user update course and a V8 XM administrator’s course. There will also be AutoCAD-to-MicroStation courses and an AutoCAD Fundamentals series.

Enterprise learning engine is now ready for IT and CAD Managers.

Clearwater, Florida, USA — Axiom, the world’s largest provider of full e-learning courses for Bentley software, announces the release of its new learning engine called LearningBay Enterprise, designed for the IT/CAD managers who support medium to large organizations across multiple offices.

LearningBay Enterprise compliments Axiom’s other learning engine, LearningBay Professional, by offering features that go beyond delivery of browser-based training. In addition to tracking e-learning activities, LearningBay Enterprise now offers extensive administration tools, such as registration for onsite/offsite seminars and instructor-led training.

In recent years, Axiom has steadily developed an impressive catalog of Microsoft, MicroStation and GEOPAK courses. Students can train on MicroStation J through V8, including V8 XM — not to mention Microsoft® Office 2000/2003 and the popular Microsoft Office for Designers training courses.

All of these browser-based courses can be delivered through LearningBay Professional and LearningBay Enterprise, right to desktops, through a web browser — without installing any software on the student’s computer.

Over 200 companies have implemented LearningBay Professional, a learning management system that has proven both reliable and effective for presenting Axiom’s growing CAD training courses. However, after working with some of the largest engineering firms in the world, it became clear that there was a need for a true, enterprise-wide training solution.

Enter LearningBay Enterprise, Axiom’s enterprise learning management system solution. This new solution incorporates enterprise features such as Active Directory support, a Windows technology that provides one login to the multiple systems that make up the network, detailed reporting on student progress and activities (available as an Excel spreadsheet) and supports large numbers of student logins. LearningBay Enterprise is the answer to the needs of companies with multiple offices, meeting the demands of even our largest corporate clients. After a year of surveying customers, researching and discovering what was needed, Axiom now delivers the next-generation learning engine.
LearningBay Enterprise integrates easily with corporations who have standardized on Microsoft® products. Driven by configuration files, LearningBay Enterprise is easily customized to meet company standards and preferences. High capacity means large organizations can connect thousands of users across local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN), virtual private networks (VPN) and the Internet to make training available on every desktop throughout the corporation.

Some significant features of LearningBay Enterprise edition include:

• Scalability — LearningBay Enterprise’s largest test to date was with over 16,000 simultaneous connected users with no degradation of performance.
• Customization — From reports to layout, customize LearningBay Enterprise using simple configuration files to create your corporate online university.
• Integration — Move student records and performance from LearningBay Enterprise to XML, comma delineated files or Excel spreadsheets for easy integration into other internal systems.
• Testing — Administer pre- and post-tests to assess student performance.
• Learning Tracks — Assign courses to job titles or company certification programs, with automatic course enrollments. This feature allows any administrator to easily add new hires, or handle employee promotions, without manually enrolling each one into required courses.

In addition, all the features that have made Axiom’s course content for Bentley products so popular over the years are still in place. Intuitive course flow, comprehensive video lessons, hands-on labs and all the established favorites available in LearningBay Professional remain intact in LearningBay Enterprise.

So what does this all mean? In a broad sense it means Axiom continues to expand its training offerings. Axiom’s goal is to offer a training solution for companies of all sizes and requirements, and now there is a dedicated solution for the enterprise customer.

More specifically, medium to large companies can connect LearningBay Enterprise to existing technologies, such as, Microsoft SQL Server database, IIS web server and other human resources systems, while deploying Axiom’s extensive training libraries across the entire enterprise. Now after a year of development, Axiom’s LearningBay Enterprise is ready to go.

By Mike Arroyo, Vice President for Learning
LearningBay has an optional authoring module that allows you to add new content or modify the content that comes with it freely and easily. The authoring module provides many functions. Chief among them are the following:

• Drag-and-drop content into a repository.
• Reorganize course contents.
• Assign screen names to pages without renaming files.
• Create lists of exam questions.
• Generate online exams.
• Provide remedial content from missed exam questions.

Drag-and-drop!
With the authoring module, you can create content using any software tool you like and simply drop it into LearningBay. LearningBay allows authors of all skill levels to create content pages. Novice authors may use applications like Microsoft® Word, PaintBrush or Excel to quickly create text and graphics.

Assign quiz questions to pages.

When a course is complete, drag and drop the contents into the LearningBay Repository. Our compliancy with WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) and OPML (Outline Protocol Markup Language) transforms your folders and page names into a dynamic navigation for the online class.

Screen names
With the authoring module, pages and folders may be reordered, renamed or hidden from the student without altering the original filenames. Screen names may be assigned to pages, providing clarity to the student participating in the online class.

Create exams
Assign as many questions as you like to each page of the course. When taking an exam, if the student chooses some incorrect answers, LearningBay tags the appropriate pages and generates a remedial course based on the missed questions.

The authoring module also includes an export function to extract the course contents from the repository. All pages and assets (such as images, video and audio) are placed on a local computer using the same folder layout as the original course. An XML file is also created to allow the course to be imported to a different LearningBay server. This means your courses are never locked inside a proprietary database.

The end result, such as this one for Efficient Engineering, is a set of pages containing custom content, including their personal text and graphics.