As a Gold Sponsor of this year’s TechLearn Conference in New York City from November 14 - 17, SumTotal Systems, the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, will kick off its annual appearance at the show, with a day-long program of sessions on corporate learning and business performance best practices. The schedule of presentations, which runs from 9:45 a.m. — 5 p.m. on Monday, November 15, will be highlighted by a panel discussion on integrated learning technologies, held from 2:45 — 3:45 p.m. and hosted by Josh Bersin, leading industry analyst and president of Bersin and Associates. The panel features SumTotal customers Johnson & Johnson, Dun & Bradstreet, NCR, Symbol Technologies, Wachovia, as well as product specialists from SumTotal and SumTotal partner SkillSoft. Discussion will focus on the technical and business implications of integrating learning technologies such as CD-based applications and externally and internally hosted content, with learning management systems. This session will be recorded and made available as a webcast after the conference. Please visit www.sumtotalsystems.com/events for details on how to access the recording. Other sessions, presented by learning and technology experts from SumTotal and its customers, include: Leading Edge: The Top Ten Learning Innovations,” held from 9:45 - 10:45 a.m. and hosted by Jon Ciampi, director of product management at SumTotal and Francisco Soeltl, president of SumTotal partner MicroPower. Ciampi and Soeltl will review the latest innovative uses of learning technology that deliver bottom-line results, including specific, real-world implementations and technology uses. Examples will detail organizations that have pushed the boundaries of organizational learning to deliver unique benefits and value. “Optimizing Training and Performance in the Call Center,” held from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. In this session, Ciampi, along with Jim Everidge, president and CEO of SumTotal partner Rapid Learning Deployment, LLC, will discuss the challenge of improving call center agent performance when training time is limited. Ciampi also will cover learning initiatives for improving call center customer service levels and performance, as well as how best to deliver learning to call center representatives while minimizing their time away from customers. “An Integrated And Blended Training Approach To Product Launches,” held from 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. Ciampi will join with a major retail customer to outline how to use learning as an effective tool in launching new products, including aligning the learning process with business objectives for the launch, decreasing time-to-market, readying partners, sales associates and services and support teams, and how to measure the results. In addition to its presentations, SumTotal also will showcase its industry-leading learning and business performance solutions — including a preview of its soon-to-be-launched SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0 — at its booth (#203) throughout the three days of the show. Also in conjunction with TechLearn, SumTotal will convene a gathering of its Customer Advisory Board (CAB), made up of many of the company’s largest enterprise customers from a wide variety of global geographies and industry sectors. SumTotal formed the CAB as a forum for customers to interact with each other around common business and industry challenges and to give the company valuable feedback it will use to ensure that its products, services and processes target those challenges. CAB members include such industry and government leaders as United Airlines, Microsoft, Albertson’s, Wyeth, Cendant, Cingular Wireless, Wachovia, the US Army, GlaxoSmithKline and New Horizons.