Product Review of Administrate

Administrate is a training and learning management software used to deliver exceptional e-learning services. It includes both a training and learning management system, and online course booking options designed to save users time and money. Administrate can be set up in minutes, and most clients are fully up and running in a few days.
Website: https://www.getadministrate.com/
What Users Love About the App
“It fits very well with our business needs. It’s available on the Cloud, so there are no IT management issues. It manages our sales opportunities, our training events, our client communications, etc.”
“Definitely easy to us. The software is reasonably intuitive and links information together in a meaningful way. It has changed the way we do business with our customers and we are now able to provide a far superior level of customer service. As the data in the system builds the reports, we can build from Administrate. They are helping us make better business decisions and become proactive rather than reactive.”
“The best thing about the product is the way the courses are displayed to the customer, enabling them to easily sort by location, course, or date in order to select what they are looking for. It’s not amazing, and we needed to customize it quite heavily before we could use it, but it looked better than what we had. This is despite it not being possible to put the dates and locations anywhere else but right at the bottom of a course page. We then embarked on a lengthy setup process for the next 5 months to try and get it setup for our needs.”
“The reporting engine in Administrate is outstanding. It is training focused, so it provides reports on the measures that are important to me as the head of the global training business. The integrated LMS is simple but flexible and, coupled with a good authoring tool, can be deployed very simply. The most important aspect of Administrate is the REST API which we have used to build an entirely bespoke booking system that integrates tightly with our other core SaaS tools to give a single coherent view to our customers.”
“It is intuitive and easy to use, visual and logical, but not everyone’s brain processes things in the same way. Everything is in one place and available from anywhere in the world if you have internet access.”
“The system works best for our Open (Public) Programmes, where the dates and prices and course content are known and published in advance. Our Open Programmes team loves the software. I like the ability to track an opportunity from beginning to end and link it to the training event that arises from winning the sale. It enables me to have a complete view of everything in our pipeline through to all events we are running. I like that it is a single piece of software that pretty much covers everything you need to run a training company.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“The software is not so good for bespoke programmes that are run for clients. We tend to use the system minimally for event scheduling and keep most data on a separate spreadsheet. The financial reporting and tracking doesn’t work for our company as it doesn’t easily support invoicing and tracking at session(workshop) level, only at event level. This might not be an issue for most training companies but for us it is, as we run multi-workshop events for our clients and bill as we go. There is also a lack of control for different users with different roles.”
“The inability to differentiate who has access to certain areas of the control panel means that everyone in our company has to have full access to all functions within the software. It’s not an issue in our small company but I could see that it could be for others.”
“Initially (we began using it in 2015) the software was very focused on classroom training and did not have a robust offering for online courses (e-learning). Administrate considers two halves of their software, the Training Management System for booking events and the Learning Management System that is the more traditional student portal for completing e-learning. They continue to grow and evolve the LMS portion, so while it did not initially have all the features we would like, they are making updates at a good pace.”
“The financial module is in need of an update, which is coming. A lot of templates have to be re-entered each time as there are no copy functions within the platform, which is a drawback when building a lot of courses. The pace of developing the platform is slow, hopefully they are working on this to make it faster. In some areas, Administrate is falling behind newer platforms.”
“Being on the other side of the world, and being the first country in the world to see the new day, we do experience challenges around time and date stamping. The ADM team has been working on this within the system.”
“We had a range of problems getting various elements of this software set up: email integration took 2 weeks after a back and forth with their support team, which was eventually resolved after they verified our url, despite swearing blind this had been done before. The communication triggers are complex, they do not allow you to test them without actually assigning delegates to courses (and getting billed), and all emails sent by the system are in plain text. This could be changed as it just did not look professional.”
“When a course is selected, the pages where users enter their details look like really basic HTML pages from the 90’s. It does not look right compared to today’s slick styles on the web that people have come to expect.”