Saba People 2010 Trip Report – Part 2

Wednesday 3rd November

Well, what a way to start the day – a highly entertaining keynote from Gary Whitney from the Intercontinental Hotel Group.

  • “To have customers live your brand have to engage your people”
  • “A brand is delivered by the people at the front line.”
  • “if you want people to love your brand, you had better love your people!”
  • “It’s the first follower who makes the leader”

The last point was very amusingly demonstrated by the use of the video below – this came back to haunt us later that day during dinner when Jeff Carr started the dance in the restaurant!
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Next up, the Saba Customer Excellence Awards – I am delighted to report that Legal & General were awarded the Collaboration & Social Media Power Award for our use of the Saba Collaboration tools within Saba Learning. This is another well deserved tribute for the team – well done team!

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The next session was led by Saba founder, Bobby Yazdani and featured 6 young  entrepreneurs – I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but this turned out to be a great session! Here’s some brief notes and links from this session:

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  • Qwiki – this is a really cool way of delivering content – go visit the site to get the true experience of this. Pure genius!
  • Meet Seymour, the AI Concierge courtesy of Cleversense
  • Get your customers to add themselves to a web based CRM system – from the people who bought you webs.com, this is contactme.com.
  • We saw him last night with Fitz and the Tantrums, this  morning he shared his work in creating music for advertising . newmath.tv
  • A moving story which led to the creation of 1000 Memories.com, a place to remember loved ones.

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Next session up was my own session – I’ll be devoting a separate post to cover my material for that shortly.

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The next couple of sessions I attended were product related – firstly, as we are just about to upgrade to 5.5, a session on product improvements which included:

  • More support for blended learning
  • Informal learning can now be used to close competency gaps
  • Tasks can be assigned to all types of learning
  • Ad Hoc reporting
  • Mentors can be assigned in your profile

The next session was on the mashup portlet – as we have already deployed something similar from our friends at Comenius, I was interested to see the difference. The only addition is the ability to use Javascript as well as XHTML.

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Final session was on Content – a few new things to consider apart from the social aspects which have already been mentioned:

  • Saba Publisher 10 is now GA
  • Detect and fix – regress SCORM to find errors.
  • Export Centra to flv, mp4, mp3
  • Saba “Webster” – a new free tool to tag informal content on your intranet
  • Sabasociallearning.com

David Koehn of Saba was predicting that there will be less formal learning but it will become higher value.

To finish the day, another great summary from Peter Olguin.


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