Asking someone to define “LMS” is akin to asking someone to define “irony” (remember the movie Reality Bites?): everyone basically knows what it is, but usually not exactly. In any case, e-businesses these days just know they want an LMS because e-learning is gargantuan right now.

So what is it? It varies. It can consist of the following things but doesn’t require all of them: an online learning portal, an authoring system, a training records system, a way of managing skills, a virtual classroom. We could say, then, that an LMS comprises web technology used to plan, organize, and control learning process features, tools, and aspects, with the goal of implementing them.

An LMS can encompass all of these, but seldom does—which is okay, because it’s hardly ever necessary.