Guru's Verification engine ensures consistency, confidence, and trust in the knowledge your organization shares. Learn more.

Complementary : Guru + LMS

How is Guru different than an LMS?

At its core, Guru is different than an LMS in these 3 core areas:

  • Unifying Content: Guru taps into the tribal knowledge that exists across your enterprise, unifying knowledge from any possible source. With Guru, you aren't limited to courses or learning libraries. Instead, you can tap into the collective intelligence of your entire company.
  • Verifying Content: Products and processes change all the time. With Guru, we've built workflows to ensure knowledge is always trusted and up-to-date - ensuring adoption and making it a breeze to keep knowledge accurate.
  • Empowering Reps: Guru is purpose-built for micro-learning in just-in-time scenarios. We give your teams exactly what they need based on the context of what they're working on, and use AI to surface that knowledge when and where they need it most.

This is what we've been told consistently by our customers who use various training software:

  1. The LMS supports onboarding, virtual training and certification - rep usage is more 'event-based,' centered around things like product launches and regulatory workplace and compliance trainings
  2. Guru is used for the fastest access to just in-time, situational knowledge directly in workflow. There can be overlap of content, but Guru is the source of truth that's being referenced on an ongoing daily basis
    1. Guru's team usage information and search analytics help drive what new training content is produced and trained on in the learning mgmt system. In this sense, Guru makes the LMS a better investment, because you're working off of actual data, rather than assumptions about what is important to train your team on.

Customer Testimonials

Do Guru customers commonly use an LMS with Guru?

The vast majority of the mid-market and certainly Enterprise customers we support, also use an LMS. We even have a few LMS/LXS vendors as customers, most notably Instructure, Degreed and MindTickle.

Here are some of the LMS solutions our customers utilize in conjunction with Guru:

  • Workramp + Guru - Intercom, Looker, Square, Lever, Front, Zoom, ChiliPiper, Auditboard, Go Forward, UserGems, Airtable

Looker

Jaleel Mackey, Senior Account Executive

“We've created a ramp plan on a single card and connected that card to various associated cards throughout our Guru universe. Guru has become an interactive scavenger hunt for relevant information, and with some thought, we've been able to curate an onFoldering experience that's exciting and unique. Guru is a quintessential piece of the new hire training.”

UserGems
Braxton Carr

So when I create anything, first thing is the card and then that card can be embedded in Workramp, and the cards are embedded in Salesforce. And then the Chrome extension brings them to things like Gong.
LInk to Snippet

  • Skilljar + Guru - Spotify
  • LearnUpon - Noom
  • Learncore + Guru - Greenhouse
  • Lessonly + Guru - Glint, Salesloft, Glint, HireVue, Via, Turo, Rent The Runway, Pantheon, Oura Ring, Ceros

Via

Kimberly O'Neill - L&D Lead

"Yeah. I mean just in terms of like the simplification, we use Lessonly, other LMS, and I think just like, I mean, I've only been at via now for almost two years. But ever since I joined, I learned right away that you can embed Guru cards directly and Lessonly. And that just like saves us so much time effort, all the things because we really use Guru as a source of truth. And I'm just embedding Guru cards into lessons all the time so that we don't have to then go back and update our lessons. So that integration has worked, really well for." Link to snippet

  • Bridge - Slack links to Guru from Bridge (an LMS built by Guru customer Instructure) and also links to Bridge lessons in Guru. If a user realizes that they don't know a whole lot about the subject, they can easily find the Bridge course and take a quick refresher. Read more here

Slack

Stephanie Lo, Customer Experience Training Manager

"Taking an LMS course is like watching a video, and Guru is your textbook or your notes that you have open next to you. Because I know that new hires will look at that one section of the course in the LMS, click on the accompanying Guru link, read all the supplemental information in Guru, and then come back to the LMS and continue on with the course

Slack champions on Guru + LMS

What goes in the LMS vs. the Knowledge Management solution?

When thinking about this, consider what content, activities and communities (knowledge, training and interactions) do the people working in your organization actually need in order to provide the highest value to customers?

It usually depends largely on the nature of the work being done. It is useful to consider the following categories of work, proposed some years ago by Winslow and Bramer in Futurework.

Tips for making Guru work well with an LMS

  1. Encourage searching Guru in your learning modules
    1. This will make the usually passive experience of using an LMS more active and engaging, and it will also condition users to search in Guru early on
    2. Examples:
      1. Embed Guru Cards into the LMS solution
      2. Clicking a Guru link from within an LMS will open the card from the extension over the LMS.
      3. Encourage reps to search for information that can only be found in Guru but will be referenced on the quiz at the end of the learning module
  2. Create an ecosystem that will follow the 70 - 20 - 10 rule!
    1. Use your LMS for instruction (10% of learning)
    2. Use Chat (Slack, etc.) for internal communication (20% of learning)
    3. Use Guru for in-the-moment accessing of knowledge (70% of learning)

You must have Author or Collection Owner permission to create Guru Cards. Contact your team's Guru admins to use this template.