SumTotal 20.1 Is A Big Step Forward: Here's Why

SumTotal 20.1 is here! 

It's time to test the changes and get some hands-on experience in the time-saving improvements for administrators.

Many of the enhancements are small improvements, but when they add up, they amount to a big step forward in usability. There are far too many enhancements and fixes to list here, but we want to celebrate one that can have a huge impact on your organization. 

Develop and Retain Your Top Talent 

The biggest impact you can have on keeping your talent people is to give them the tools to develop themselves and to reward them for their achievements. One of the most rewarding ways to appreciate self-development is to give your talented people an opportunity to apply their new skills. 

The best ways to do that, other than promotion, is to make internal talent available for project teams, special projects, and other opportunities across your organization. We call it an internal gig economy. 

The Talent Search improvements are an opportunity for you to make a big impact on talent development and motivate your high performers to stay. 

When Talent Search first appeared in SumTotal 19.3, it was useful, all but not nearly as much as it is now. In SumTotal 20.1, it includes a talent pool structure that enables administrators to shape talent pools in very useful ways. From the toolbar you can: 

• add employees to an existing pool from a search result, 
• remove one or more employees from a pool, 
• compare two or more employees in a Talent only or Learn only talent pool, and 
• export any talent pool search results as a CSV file. 

Talent Search also has powerful and useful integrations with both Succession Planning and the Development Plan. 

This enhancement will make it much easier for team leaders and managers to search for talent within your organization and give your people a chance to show off their skills. 

New Integrations 

We also find SumTotal's integration path exciting as it continues to build REST APIs to make connections easier. We counted 42 new APIs and enhancements for sixteen of them. 

SumTotal is on a path to eliminate the need for customers to build custom integrations. 

Is Your Plan Ready? 

Now that the 20.1 releases in your staging environment, it's time to get busy. If you're new to SumTotal updates, we have a few recommendations to make things go smoothly. 

• We recommend that you review each one of the fixes and enhancements to see how they may affect your user or change your admin procedures. You'll want to communicate to your users what's changing and update your support documentation. 
• Review the changes to data management, imports, and exports. Evaluate how they can improve your data streams between applications. 
• SumTotal tests every release and continues testing during the staging period, but it does not test your configuration or processes. Test business processes changes to prevent usability issues when 20.1 goes live on March 20. 

Download your copy of SumTotal Suite 20.1 What's New if you haven’t already to check your update plan. 

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