Let's say you work at a company of 2000 people and you are the person with decision making power to buy the LMS and authoring software. Granted, this may not happen in many organizations, but I am interested in what systems and software give designers a reliable, high quality, and relatively glitch free development experience.

Projects involve software training with soft skills like communication and collaboration. Let's say you're shopping for:
* a middle of the road LMS with a good support staff
* one rapid eLearning authoring tool
* one "heavy duty" authoring tool like Authorware or Toolbook

What would you pick for each bullet and why? Which authoring tools' output works well with a lot of LMSs out there? As discussed, in other posts, Captivate can be buggy at times...

send me an email and I will share what I have.. a personal review of LMS's, and a list of features and function.. it may be helpful. scase20@juno.com

Had that situation with 13,500 employees, and another at a major University.

Won some battles, lost others

Really depends on many things like budget, staff in place, culture, culture, then there's culture...

Feel free to contact me, I have "favorites", but truly these are "tools I like" and perhaps not a more objective "best tool for job".

PS> Tools I like are Articulate/Wondershare(depending on your budget), Moodle, and Flash (this is our "anything goes" tool).

There is A LOT to this decision, but I would suggest looking into these:

* Trivantis Coursemill (good and not too expensive) or Saba's LMS (great but more expensive) for the "middle of the road LMS with a good support staff."
* Articulate (great for Power Point conversions) or Adobe Captivate (great for screen capture for software demos and sims and and the new version is MUCH less buggy that previous versions) for the rapid eLearning authoring tool.
* Trivantis Lectora for the one "heavy duty" authoring tool. Now, depending on what you intend to do and what your LMS does, you may not need a heavy duty product. Articulate and especially Captivate are fairly feature rich - a lot of companies don't need more.

I'd also suggest having Flash for fancy interactive stuff.

In case anyone suggests Adobe Authorware, be aware that it Adobe has stopped development on this product. You can still purchase it, but (as per Adobe) it will not be updated and it is not Vista supported.