TraineeTracker was developed by Richard Brincefield of SofTrain Inc.

In 1980, Richard began working with a version of CBT (CDTS - Computer Directed Training System) that was a forerunner of WBT. It ran on Honeywell mainframes. Students from around the world could take courses, as long as they had access to a terminal and the World-Wide Honeywell network. Richard spent over 300 hours taking courses on subjects such as COBOL, GMAP (Honeywell GCOS8 Mainframe Assembly Language), JCL, and Time Sharing etc. He learned more from this online training than all the traditional classes he had previously taken on these same subjects. He could review the content when it was convenient to him. He was able to access training from home using an Execuport portable terminal at 300 baud with thermal paper printouts. In the mid 1980's, he installed and maintained CDTS on newer mainframes based in Phoenix Arizona. The training was accessed from Australia, France, and England as well as the U.S. CDTS had all the features supported by a modern LMS, including registration, routing, reporting and an authoring system.

Richard also supported installing and maintaining courseware on 3Com LANs (when Novell was in its infancy, and Microsoft had not purchased the 3Com software to build their own LAN solutions). CBT courses, such as TeleTutor's X.25 were available from the LAN Server. It was excellent training even by today's CBT/WBT standards. A more up-to-date version can be found today by going to www.teletutor.com (now owned by www.vcampus.com).

Richard later developed CBT courses using ToolBook and Authorware designed to run from a LAN.

Richard first came in contact with HTML in 1994. That set the foundation for his future education work.

Richard went to work at the University of Phoenix in 1996 and was there for four years. During this time, he was assigned for two years to a "skunk" team project headed by the university president to develop Web-based training. He introduced IBTAuthor (now known as Docent) to the University. He continued to support Docent for the university under contract until February 2003 when they finally had sufficient internal support.

Richard's dream for many years has been Global Literacy. Existing LMS's were all proprietary and expensive prior to development of TraineeTracker. Most LMS's are based on older technologies. Richard decided to develop a new LMS based on superior technology that could be used by the masses, as well as by large companies and governments

The primary standard for developing both content and LMS is W3C's HTTP, in which variables are passed by name pairs. The LMS engines are products such as ColdFusion, PHP, and JSP (Java Server Pages) that are written in C/C++ and/or Java. These engines become part of the Web server on UNIX, Linux, and Windows hosts. With their powerful scripting capabilities, LMS's can be developed using very powerful and expandable scripting languages. You can start with a small PC (Windows or Linux) and expand to clustered, load-balanced servers running Sun Solaris with Oracle. Another option is to use an IBM mainframe with multiple copies of Linux running.

Richard started actively working on the TraineeTracker LMS on 1/1/2000. The product was completed and ready to market in early 2002.

Today and in the future, SofTrain will focus on promoting Global Literacy. Our TraineeTracker product is one of a new generation of tools that can be used to promote literacy by offering a low-cost training management solution accessible by a worldwide audience.

SofTrain is a global and diverse company. We are a cyber organization, with officers and staff living in various parts of the country. We use the Internet to hold meetings, complete projects, and communicate with clients.

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