Is the Licence perpetual, ie. once you buy it, it’s yours, Concurrent or Named User; this will effect usability and cost. Establish whether the Licence model allows you to capture all your applications or is only one application per Licence. Also, consider what might happen when your application upgrades; can you get assurance from the vendor that the tool will still work?

Smart design in content authoring means that you can generate many outputs from a single process recording. This can dramatically reduce the time and cost of creating effective training content. Outputs include training documentation, training simulations, user acceptance tests and in-application performance support.

Rapid authoring often involves the use of templates and styles. The latest trend is hierarchal authoring, a real bonus for Project Teams who just need subject matter experts or business process owners to capture the basic process without being exposed to the full functionality (and often complexity and risk) of the tool.

Changes in technology mean that you must constantly adapt training content. It is therefore crucial that your chosen solution allows you to manage content, templates and libraries as well as support collaborative authoring with workflow, version control and status management. This can reduce the cost of maintaining content.

If you are rolling out applications in various languages, then a training solution that can offer simple and straightforward translation of your content to facilitate roll-out will save a great deal of time. This is especially pertinent when your content is continually changing.

Having the option of Cloud or on-premise means that you can choose the option that best suits your needs. On-premise means the solution is stored and accessed locally, i.e. on a computer or server. Cloud-based means it's stored on your chosen vendor’s server and accessed via a browser. The decision will be guided by your organisation’s IT strategy and security, as well as requirements for maintaining and managing upgrades and also project requirements, such as the importance of team collaboration and sharing resources.

In many organisations there will be silos of different teams or projects that have already invested in training solutions to meet their own specific requirements. It may therefore be necessary to identify the defacto enterprise solution and re-develop any existing content. Ownership should be strategic to maximise Licences, resources and user benefits.