Welcome to the community and congratulations on your first posting. The question you raise is similar to others on this forum and unfortunately I'm not going to answer the question you ask, partly because I can't, but partly because I think you are already a long way to answering for yourself.

Many schools are having success with all of the providers you mention and many you don't but I am sure that all of them want their systems to do more, better, easier, different ... and this is because as we become more informed we become more demanding. I ceratinly did as a local authority adviser running a system similar to yours. As I talk about in another thread, it is essential to realise that the investment from the school, vision of the leadership and support in terms of support and training for staff - the whole change management process- that will ensure success for you. Any success from one school could fail in another setting without these essential elements.

Is it the best ? Does it matter that I don't have the best car in the world? - it still gets caught up in the traffic on the M42 and goes at 20 mph. You are doing the right thing by looking at several products, this will give you some feel for usability / friendliness. But you also need to ask what do we want this to do for our school? How can technology support our top three development aims for next year? What problem do we currently have that a learning platform can address more effectively than any other solution. These sort of questions may seem very difficult but many of the contributors to this forum are already seeing and providing answers.

Best advice I ever had with technology; under-promise and over-deliver. Unfortunately we too often find the other way round!

Good luck

Andy

I've just found this list.

We were also sucked in as part of an LEA initiative and at first Netmedia Desktop was fine BUT my experience (which cannot be taken as a school view) is:

There has been little development over 2 years and even basics like folders and zip file uploading took time to be added. We also have a speed issue (the LP is externally hosted so if the Internet goes down, you're stuck) Even a few seconds delay disrupts the flow of my (fast paced ) lessons. Individual item cannot be hidden so deletion and re-uploading is the only way to hide resources until groups should access them.

There is no linking with our MIS (CMIS) and we await a trial of Lynchpin which seems to allow creation and updating of classes and members but this is not installed yet.

One of our local schools did some research, refused this and effectively paid twice by going, independently for Frog which I have seen and appears to be under much more active development, has MANY more overarching features , linking with CMIS and seems very impressive. There is supposed to be both a technical AND teaching resources community (attractive to me) I feel we are now about two years behind them, almost in a dead end.

I would say do your research first because whilst we have found Desktop to be an excellent basic LP (especially the built in mail which has galvanised communication in school) we are now coming up against the limits of the platform and I think it is going to take a great deal of effort to change from one system to another.

Doug