Need web conferencing, an LMS, and an e-marketing/contact management tool all-in-one?  Meet eLearningZoom.

I had the pleasure yesterday of speaking with Matt Fok, CEO of eLearningZoom ~ and getting an on-the-spot demo of his new service.  Matt’s got a long history in high tech, including seven years at IBM, and I think he’s on to something with his approach to the market.

Targeting smaller and medium enterprises, eLearningZoom has focused on making learning management – both synchronous and asynchronous – an easy-to-use proposition at a very affordable price.

I won’t write an exhaustive review here (deferring you to learning more from Matt and his company’s web site), but there were a couple things that caught my eye.

One, developing a course is simple, containing the essentials you’d want.  You define the steps in the learning process, attaching the media type you want to each step.  That media type could be a PDF, a Flash file, etc.  An integrated testing option allows you to assess at each step and redirect or allow permission to proceed based on pass/fail scoring.

Two, the emeeting platform is based on DimDim (who I introduced you to a couple months back) in part, according to Matt, their open-source approach to their platform.

Third, integrating a contact manager I think would be quite useful for many SMBs – especially when working with customers and partners external to the organization.  A potential use case I didn’t think to ask Matt at the time was how one might synchronize that data with an existing CRM/contact manager – but it’s unlikely this is a showstopper.

Finally, integrated e-commerce!  This is a fast-growing need for many companies who don’t wish to undertake the pain of setting up their own credit card clearing and bank relationships.

It was unclear to me how seamless it was to integrate the on-demand content/modules with live web seminars in terms of testing and permissions to complete the course, but I wouldn’t let that stop you from investigating the options eLearningZoom provides.  Know your use case, and more importantly, evaluate the offering relative to its affordable price.

If you’ve ever wanted to explore an LMS and the price tag was offputting, eLearningZoom is worth investigation.