Formal vs/ Informal Learning

Had a chance to view a presentation regarding the open source LMS called, "Sakai".
 I've actually been watching this LMS system grow and evolve over the past several years.

What struck me however, was the fact that it really is focused from the instructor and end user point of view. Not really designed as a full featured application that includes billing capabilities as well as tracking learning analytics.
So it really comes down to what you are looking for and what requirements are driving you to look for a learning management system.
Our company has just completed an extensive 9 month analysis of learning management systems.
 We found many very good applications and again, depending on your needs and requirements, each one would come out on top. I won't say which was selected but another very important variable is the group that you will be working with.
 Not the sales engineer that says their product will do everything but rather the implementation team that you will live and die with.
Well, we are into the next phase of the project, which is getting corporate funding. This is actually harder than the first phase of selection.
I think this is my sixth implementation project related to learning management systems and it doesn't get any easier. Now the end users also want web 2.0 features as well as the ability to rapidly create and upload web courses. Unfortunately, instead of seeing an improvement in the quality of the new web courses I see more and more page turners.
Seldom do people want to devote the time and money to create a really good web based course and worse than that, another division within our company might already have developed a better course than what they want to implement.

Some assembly Required

When our kids were younger and we would purchase a toy... I dreaded those words, "some assembly required" because I knew I always ended up doing all the assembly, adding the stickers, and making sure I didn't leave any of the small connectors around.
Learning in the corporate world is quite a bit like this. Seldom do elearning courses work right out of the box, end user computers don't have the right Flash Players or Java and in general since end users have a hard time reading ANY instructions.... something usually goes wrong.