SumTotal Systems Launches the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0

Learning industry leader ships new platform just nine months after Click2learn-Docent merger

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (December 16, 2004) – Achieving its most important milestone of 2004, SumTotal Systems (NASDAQ: SUMT), the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced the availability of the much-anticipated SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0. The revolutionary new platform is the first major product release for the company following its formation by the merger of Click2learn and Docent in March 2004.

The hallmark of SumTotal 7.0 is its unmatched flexibility and adaptability. SumTotal 7.0 enables organizations to "mold" the platform to the specific characteristics of the business. It dynamically adapts to an organization's changing needs, whether it's business processes, terminology and workflow, evolving organizational structures, or the personalized learning, certification and skills development needs of the individual employee. SumTotal 7.0 offers radically easier administration of learning activities, user organizations, reporting and compliance, as well as unprecedented interoperability and integration with other technology applications and infrastructures - all without the need for programming and customization.

"After months of strategy and planning, hard work from our product management and R & D teams, and extensive feedback from customers, partners and analysts, we are proud to bring to market what many have told us is this industry's most groundbreaking solution to-date," said R. Andrew Eckert, SumTotal CEO. "SumTotal 7.0 is the culmination of the product vision we established when our two companies merged earlier this year. Today, we have successfully combined the strengths of two products and two organizations to bring our customers one of the most powerful tools they can deploy to accelerate readiness, business performance and profits."

SumTotal 7.0 is comprised of eight, globally-scalable business performance management applications that enable companies to embed learning activities and relevant content into everyday business processes to achieve bottom-line results. Integrated into a single, comprehensive suite, the applications include:

• TotalLMS – delivers, manages tracks and reports on any blend of learning activities: self-paced Web, live interactive Web, on-the-job, traditional instructor-led and documentation
  


• TotalLCMS – provides a complete environment for creating, managing, assembling, and delivering learning content
  


• TotalDashboard – offers the most complete packaged solution for measuring and analyzing the impact of learning activities on business performance by connecting to mission-critical applications
  


• TotalPerformance – provides a performance management solution that ensures all levels of the organization are aligned and working together to attain business objectives
  


• TotalAccess – enables offline learning capabilities for the mobile workforce
  


• TotalCollaboration – allows instant learner collaboration with peers and experts
  


• TotalInformation – helps manage tacit knowledge by allowing authorized users to publish and manage unstructured content to any web server, with instant, searchable access to information
  


• Virtual Classroom – provides a live, Web-based forum for real-time communication and collaboration among geographically dispersed individuals

Leading industry analyst firm brandon-hall.com evaluated SumTotal 7.0 for its LMS Knowledgebase. In their write-up, the reviewing analysts wrote, " We were literally one of the first to review the new LMS solution in action. What we discovered is that the new offering isn't just "the best of Aspen meets Docent;" rather, SumTotal commendably took this opportunity to apply "lessons learned" from both companies and to create something robust and brand new." The report continued on to say, "This system is ideally suited for large-scale, enterprise implementations, but is easy enough to use for literally any setting."

Developed to address both the specific needs of vertical industries, as well as broad-reaching business challenges common across all industry sectors, SumTotal 7.0 enables organizations to effectively manage certifications and regulatory compliance; bring new products to market faster; ensure personnel readiness; align individual and corporate objectives; and communicate and collaborate in real-time with employees, channel partners, customers and suppliers.

Industry "Firsts"
SumTotal was founded on a history of industry "firsts" and SumTotal 7.0 is no exception, incorporating a list of key technology innovations that allow it to react fluidly to changes in organizations and in the marketplace as a whole. Most notable among these innovations are:

Open Activity Architecture (OAA) - a next-generation functionality that allows for streamlined management of blended learning, learning plans and courses. OAA enables the creation and maintenance of a single learning curriculum that can dynamically re-constitute itself into different learning activity combinations depending upon the group or individual. OAA allows for seamless management of the movement of those groups or individuals through the curriculum from a single point rather than requiring the creation of separate curricula for each discreet group of learners. System administrators can then set one or more prescribed learning paths or tracks through the curriculum based on job role, group membership, hire status or any number of other factors.

OAA also enables the system to dynamically adjust the prescribed learning paths to accommodate reorganizations of groups or other changes within the learner population moving through the curriculum. By automating tasks and processes such as these, that have traditionally been manual or required duplication, OAA lowers total cost of ownership, significantly reduces the administrative cycle time for organizational learning initiatives, and improves organizational performance.

Dynamic Domains - allows for grouping of individuals into a "domain", according to job role, corporate division or other characteristic, in keeping with a company's internal and external organizational hierarchy. Learning administrators can easily prescribe and manage specific learning activities based on group membership, or by audience, a sub-grouping that may combine members of several groups for a specific learning activity. The dynamic domains functionality allows individual learners to be members of several groups depending upon the learning requirements of the organization.

Prescribed learning changes automatically and dynamically when individuals change job roles or move to other groups, allowing the correct training to "follow" employees. Dynamic domains significantly reduces cycle time by automating time-consuming manual administration, and ensures that employees get the training they need to be more rapidly productive and proficient at their jobs no matter what their career paths.

Web Services - provide unparalleled interoperability with companies' existing, heterogeneous technological environments, whether .Net, J2EE or other environments. Dedicated to creating the most "open" architecture possible in SumTotal 7.0, SumTotal is the first provider in the industry to furnish customers with a Web Services software developer kit (SDK), exposing the majority of the LMS' capabilities to give customers even greater freedom and flexibility to adapt the platform to their organizations.

With more than 100 Web Services included in SumTotal 7.0, enterprises can easily integrate the platform with internal and external portals, HRIS and ERP systems, content and document management systems and other technology applications, allowing for real-time data integration and ad-hoc reporting from many sources. SumTotal 7.0 further streamlines integrations by supporting the latest Web Services standards, such as SOAP, WSDL and Disco. Web Services significantly reduce costs by eliminating the need for time-consuming IT intervention and systems integration.

Embedded LMS Reporting Capabilities - With the launch of SumTotal 7.0, TotalLMS now incorporates in-depth, dynamic reporting capabilities and a unique reporting framework out of the box. TotalLMS' rich reporting capability allows companies to easily and securely create a wide variety of reports from any LMS data, effectively measuring the impact of learning activities on a wide range of business metrics and objectives. Individual users can now create new, custom reports that organize just the right data in just the right format for their specific reporting and analysis requirements.

"I have been very impressed with SumTotal's ability to quickly bring together Click2learn and Docent and create a market-leader in the fragmented learning market," said Josh Bersin, Principal, Bersin & Associates. "SumTotal 7.0 is a market leading platform which builds upon many years of R&D from the Docent and Aspen platforms. We expect it to be on the short-list of any organization looking for an enterprise-class learning platform."

For more information about the new SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0, or to learn about upgrading, please visit www.sumtotalsystems.com or phone 1-866-SMTOTAL.

About the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0
Providing unparalleled breadth in application and depth in business functionality, the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0 is the industry's most comprehensive, globally scalable learning and business performance offering, and the only one to combine learning management, learning content management, in-depth analytics and other mission-critical, standards-based learning applications on a single, integrated platform. SumTotal 7.0 promises more flexible, rapid, strategic delivery and management of learning activities; unprecedented options for measuring learning impact on revenues, expenses, cycle time and other business results; and unique interoperability and integration capabilities that dramatically reduce the cost of ownership.

About SumTotal Systems
SumTotal Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: SUMT) is the business performance and learning technology industry's largest single provider of technologies, processes and services. Formed by the merger of industry pioneers Docent and Click2learn, the company is uniquely focused on helping organizations harness and manage mission-critical intellectual power to solve real-world business problems and produce significant bottom-line results. SumTotal has helped accelerate performance and profit for more than 600 of the world's best-known companies and federal and local government agencies, including Microsoft, AT&T, US Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard, Vodafone, Lucent, Accenture, Cendant, Harley-Davidson, Wyeth, Wachovia and D & B. SumTotal Systems is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with offices throughout the US, as well as in London, Paris, Heidelberg, Sydney, Tokyo and Hyderabad, India.

"Information in this press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements represent SumTotal Systems' expectations or beliefs concerning future events and include statements, among others, regarding SumTotal Systems' new product, SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0. These statements are not historical facts or guarantees of future performance or events and are based on current expectations, estimates, beliefs, assumptions, goals and objectives, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from the results expressed or implied by these statements. Readers of this press release are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Additional factors that could cause actual results to differ include, but are not limited to (i) unknown errors or bugs in SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0; (ii) unexpected shipment problems or delays of SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0; (iii) customers or partners delaying purchasing decisions; (iv) the acceptance of SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0 and future product offerings; (v) the ability to successfully implement SumTotal System's solutions; (vi) the ability to successfully address technological developments and standards; (vii) ability to successfully manage growth, significant current and expected additional competition, and the need to continue to expand product distribution and services offerings; and (viii) other events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in SumTotal Systems' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the quarterly report filed on Form 10Q on November 15, 2004. SumTotal Systems assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release."