The first thing you will notice about Bridge is that everything you need is available in ONE place! The menu on the left side of the screen was design to let you add content, users, group your users and assign them training in a few clicks. This is a BIG improvement from other systems such as Cornerstone OnDemand or SumTotal where you have to perform three steps on a certain page at a certain order to only find out there are another ten switches you have to flip on. Let's face it, in today's world there are not many techie minded folks and no one has time to spend hours configuring a system. This is the number one pitfall of LMSs and the reason why educational technology (edtech) gets a bad rap. Luckily Bridge let's you glide over the turbulent waters of configuration rivers (okay, okay, a bit much but, it's true ; )

Bridge comes with pretty standard capability to upload content. The main advantages it offers is that you can upload elearning modules as well as quickly create HTML5 pages, attach documents and embed video and images through its content creation function. The process is very simple; it's as simple as giving a course its name, description and commence typing in or cutting-and-pasting it directly on the screen. Bridge also scores high on deployability because is readily available across mobile devices since is Software as a Service (SaaS). What does this mean to you? Zero implementation headaches because all the hardware is handled by Instructure. All you have to do is get a license, log in and play!

As you can expect today, Bridge comes with full HTML5 capabilities to let you create or upload SCORM wrapped elearning modules and play them across all mobile platforms. However, one unique feature Bridge offers is the graphic display of reporting data from SCORM courses.

As just discussed, Bridge has a great display of data through graphic displays. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a custom reporting feature available to allow its users to really benefit from these graphic displays. However, Bridge is not alone in this faulty feature. I have yet to find a LMS product that can truly give you graphic representation of data and not just simply give you an option to export a Comma Separated Value (CSV) Excel sheet. This is so you can spend an hour or so adding graphics to the same data. Apparently, most companies are getting away with "murder" by not providing this functionality. The great news is Bridge is listening and since they are already "half way" there, it shouldn't take too long before they enable custom reporting with built-in graphics in their offering.

Bridge is (OK, I'll say it , STUPID) easy to use with friendly navigation. Even the idiots (you know who they are) running around your office with no clue of what a web browser is can operate this software. Perhaps the best feature it offers from the administrative perspective is SMART groups. What are SMART groups? Oh nothing, just a very effective way to group your users by organizational role\title. In other words, you need to assign Customer Service training to all your customer service reps in one action? Create a SMART group by that title and every user with the matching title gets the assignment. That's pretty cool! The second part why Bridge is a 20/20 from the admin perspective is its unparalleled post-sales support and easy access to development teams. This is unusual in the industry but, I attribute that to the fact that Instructure is on a mission to make Bridge in the corporate training world as resonant as Canvas is the academic world.