MadCap Syndicate Reviews & Product Details

1. As a single repository for all of our training content (in development and post-production), Xyleme has made sharing, reusing, updating, and archiving content much simpler.

2. Publishing a single content piece to multiple output profiles gives us reuse in a way we’ve never had in the past, and also takes much less time than developing each output type individually.

3. Procedure building is greatly improved (for writing labs) especially the ability to easily drop rich text fields between steps, and the ability to re-order steps which we couldn’t do two years ago.

4. Updating existing (previously published) materials, especially in the eLearning space, is drastically easier than it used to be. (For eLearning, no update to the LMS learning object(s) is required – a huge plus.)

5. Using authoring templates for development, even in a slightly inconsistent and evolutionary way, has produced greater consistency in our finished materials.

6. Review process is great! Consolidating content reviews using the Xyleme Review function has been easier than absorbing and processing individuals’ feedback. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Evolving the team’s individualistic behaviors into a shared, more standardized space has had its challenges. Developers are not quick to conform to a single set of development guidelines (nor do they have an easy time agreeing enough to establish those guidelines).

2. Working in a cloud-based development environment has presented developers with technical obstacles - lags, slow performance, and lost work. (This is a problem that has greatly improved since implementation in 2020.)

3. Customizing output styles – fonts, colors, spacing, etc. - has been frustrating for the development team. Requiring group consensus (see #1), requesting a change from a Xyleme administrator, and potentially needing to escalate to obtain Xyleme paid services – the new process continues to be burdensome to the team.

4. Feedback from the system after submitting an action is awful. A spinning “Loading” icon tells me nothing.

5. Overall speed for previewing anything is still very slow Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Prior to 2016, all of our pre-work, post-work and assessments were self-paced reading that was very expensive to produce, and we had no way of tracking completions in our LMS. We didn't have analytics to show if assessment questions were "high miss" questions, and we didn't have a way to share our training with the International Orkin Franchises who don't use our LMS.

Xyleme to overcome these challenges plus more that we never anticipated.

We converted over 3,000 pages of content to eLearning, moving away from massive binders. We've helped save roughly $250K per year in printing and shipping costs.

All eLearning is our LMS for tracking.

The Review Process has dramatically improved and increased our review process with SMEs and Operations partners. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is nothing that we dislike about our partnership with Xyleme. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reuse & Scalability ¬¬– Xyleme allows us to maximize our resources. We can easily scale reusable design elements and focus on customizing the content that means the most to our customers.

Version Management – Xyleme’s advanced versioning functionality has helped us easily navigate regulatory audits.

Customer Service – From Feature Friday webinars and Ask the Experts support to one-on-one calls, Xyleme provides multiple channels for dialogue and support. Xyleme is truly our partner in implementing a successful learning strategy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I’d like to see more mobile-friendly interactive components for authoring. However, I’m sure these are already on Xyleme’s roadmap for future releases as Xyleme listens to customer feedback to continuously enhance features to meet our authoring and deployment needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Linkability & Reusability - The ability to link and reuse content helped us drastically cut down on development time. We are a health care organization, so when we built content around Covid-19, the content was being updated on an almost weekly basis due to the newness of the virus and all of the changing protocols. Having all of that content linked drastically reduced our development time as content continuously evolved.

Customer Support - There are so many resources and support available. Every day there are live help sessions to attend, plus a "Feature Friday" twice a month and a "Core Team Roundtable" monthly. There is also an online "Yammer" community to participate in and connect with other Xyleme users.

Open to Feedback and Ideas - Xyleme has a platform for users to submit feedback and ideas...and they LISTEN to it! Many new features and behaviors have been implemented in the system due to customers voicing feedback and Xyleme acting on it.

Ease of Use - After initial training, the interface is simple to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Restrictive Interactive Development - While Xyleme offers several element types to use to deliver content to learners (ImageMap, Tabs, Slideshow), truly engaging content is limited. Almost all elements within the system are a "click and see" behavior for the learner. Would love to see more interactive (think gamification, responsive interactions) elements available.

Web Developer skills are needed to truly optimize on all Xyleme has to offer. Someone with the knowledge of HTML, CSS, Java will have the ability to modify and "play with" the system much more, creating more interactive elements (web components) and output styles and branding. It would be great if the sort of "backend stuff" on outputs was more user-friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Xyleme product has changed the way we do business. We are more efficient, more effective, and more productive because of it. Also, the Xyleme team is the best. We feel like they are truly our partner and we can reach out and talk to anyone one of them at any time we need them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is really nothing I don't like. If there are things we would like to see in the software, Xyleme has a robust request system and our ideas are often implemented. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reusing content is potentially valuable. In theory, you can save time by writing content once and re-using it throughout many courses. However, this depends a lot on your content. Often, the same content is not used across many courses, so this benefit may not be as big as it would seem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Xyleme is challenging to use, often buggy, and is limited in what it can create.

Although the user interface has recently been overhauled, Xyleme still remains quite challanging to use. Creating simple text elements, like lists is often cumbersome. Xyleme enforces an unnecessarily strict structure onto the content you create which often prevents you from adding content where you like. There are numerous arbitrary rules to what can be placed where - Slides cannot have inline text, Image Maps must have a title, etc.

We have been using Xyleme for a number of years, and though it has improved, it remains quite buggy. Overlays, which allow you to annotate images, very often come out misaligned when published. Copying and pasting content often results in errors. We have had course content become inaccessible due to the underlying XML content becoming corrupt.

Functionality is also pretty limited. There are a few elements that you can add to a Web course that add some interactivity, but for the most part, its just text and images. The built-in interactive elements are limited: Image Maps do not allw much customization and do not look too aethethtically pealseing. The new Catagories interaction is extraordinarily restrictive, as if it was designed with only one specific purpose in mind. Xyleme has Web Components that allow you to create customised HTML content, but unfortuately, they are nearly impossible for a developer to use and are quite lmited for the programmer as well.

Xyleme claims to be able to produce many outputs from one source of content. But this is not entirely true - one of the first things you learn is that there are 2 main types of source docuemnts: Web course for creating web coures, and SSP for creating print/PDF documents.

I really wish that Xyleme would do better, since content reuse can be a huge time saver. Unfortunately, the difficulties in producing content end up wasting a lot of time as well. Unless you expect to re-use a significant amount of content, you will not be saving much time overall. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Xyleme's powerful flexibility and efficiency for both developing and delivering content. With Xyleme we can re-use content from course to course, consistently develop high-quality, on brand content regardless of the ISD and then deliver that content across multiple platforms all while retaining the ability to track and monitor course consumption and progress. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Xyleme is a data rich application with some beneficial reports available out of the box, we'd love the ability to have advanced reporting capabilities to make even better business decisions with the wealth of information available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Xyleme's support and education resources are responsive and truly world-class. At its core, the XML based platform provides an extensive and customizable framework from which we can build a scalable authoring and publishing platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The web editor is too narrowly focused on single document authoring. It lacks a comprehensive view of the entire learning repository while authoring. This is important when your learning model leans heavily of object reuse. The new Editor (2020) interface is much improved, but more work is needed before it can replace the Desktop Editor. Desktop editor, while powerful, has aged, and it shows. I would like to see Xyleme invest a little to make some fundamental improvements to their Desktop Editor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to link content across learning solutions (instructor-led classes, web-based training, tip sheets, reference guides, etc.), has significantly cut down on our education development time. In addition, the ability to quickly customize a learning solution for a specific customer has been invaluable. With Xyleme, we can do this without spending the resources on creating a whole new module/learning solution from the ground up. Since we can quickly link content from other places, we can quickly create the specific education that any particular audience needs, once that content lives within Xyleme. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This isn't really a dislike, but a consideration for other companies. It does require careful governance and planning to reach the full ROI of this system. You can't just start developing content before carefully considering how you want content to be reused, how you want Xyleme to be structured, and without putting some type of usage governance in place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Xyleme platform exceeded our expectations in that it allowed us to create chunks of learning content and easily publish the same content to different audiences and output formats. Our learning department serves many audiences who interact with the same products and services different ways. Before Xyleme, we had accumulated a high volume of duplicated training content that we had to maintain and translate, which became increasingly expensive. When we moved to Xyleme, we were able to redesign our content into reusable chunks of XML-based content. We can now use the same chunk in multiple training modules and publish it many ways with a click of a button -- and maintain only one version of the content! We also use Xyleme's Content Delivery Service (CDS) for all our training content and have integrated it with various learning portals and our LMS so that we are storing only one copy of the finished learning content. Nice!

Functionality aside, Xyleme has gone to great lengths to forge a personal, trusting, and supportive relationship with our team. Highlights include their daily open Q&A and Ask the Expert questions where you can get support from experts in the Xyleme team at no extra cost (just when you need it most and can't afford to wait), and their Feature Friday training sessions with a different topic every other week. Any time we've had urgent issues, the Xyleme team has come to our rescue and worked closely until our problems are solved. Their customer success programs are outstanding and they go out of their way to connect customers together so we can help each other. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our company has invested considerable time and effort to develop skills in house to build custom web components and templates so we can output the XML source to many different custom formats, brands and designs. When we first moved to the platform, our designers had to get used to the idea of working within the constraints of the templates. But we all understand the value of the trade-off so this isn't really a complaint -- just something that takes some planning and change management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.