The vendor's tools and products must comply with industry standards (AICC, IEEE, etc.). These standards have as their goal to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring interoperability among products by different vendors. No consumer of eLearning wants a one-vendor monopoly. Standards allow many vendors to collectively move this still very young industry forward.

Your IT group may have additional standards which software products must meet in order to be approved for deployment. You may need to "lobby" for approval. Make sure you are not doing the organization a disservice: choose only sound products built with top-notch toolsets. Often the "plug-in" issue arises. It isn't that plug-ins are "evil"; it's that in the past flaky plug-ins got onto users' computers and caused IT groups huge headaches. If the product requires plug-ins, do your homework before you go to IT: Is the plug-in vendor well-know, reputable, and possibly already approved for this or other technologies by your IT group? If not, gather as much information as you can about the vendor and their plug-in and provide this to the IT group.

Determine what computing resources the product uses, the patterns of usage of the product in your organization and "do the math". Is their software too demanding of resources. Make sure your computing and networking infrastructure can truly support the vendor's product architecture. Often this is not simply a question of what your architecture will support. Typically computing resources are shared resources and all uses compete. Make sure the utilization you propose to make is acceptable to the overall organization.

Next - Avoid Common Mistakes in Vendor Selection