Looking for a Multi-Tenant LMS platform? There are literally hundreds to choose from. Perhaps the provider you selected when you were getting started seemed good at the time, but you didn’t know what you didn’t know about LMSs, and you didn’t know how your eLearning business would grow.
Your current single tenant LMS is functional. It was designed to get you up and running quickly and it fit your budget at the time.
Most likely it is an offshoot of a LMS created for corporate use and geared towards selling courses to end users, not to businesses.
It includes many features you’re not using, some you don’t need, and it is not SCORM compliant. But you’re making do because you are familiar with the interface, and it offers some limited eCommerce capabilities that allow you to sell your courses directly to customers.
All your courses are loaded and delivered through the platform, but it does not support multiple sub-sites, or tenants, so all your customers are forced to browse your entire course catalog to find the ones that apply to them and it’s getting pretty crowded up there.
Lately you’ve been getting customization requests from existing accounts that are difficult or impossible to execute, and inquiries from potential new customers seeking a training provider with capabilities you do not support, like Single Sign-On (SSO) or external LMS integration.
Your LMS platform, while sufficient for a start-up, is now limiting your business opportunities. It’s time to think about the bigger picture.
You have to deliver training into different environments and through multiple channels. You need a way to streamline the customization and updating of individual courses.
Before you start adding extensions to your current single tenant LMS or building parallel LMSs to handle demand, think about moving to a scalable, SCORM-compliant, multi-tenant LMS platform.
Do More With Multi-tenant LMS Platform Compartmentalization
A multi-tenant LMS does much more than provide a dedicated, branded LMS portal to each client; it compartmentalizes data to keep critical information for each account separate and private, be it for sales tracking and user reporting purposes, or to easily customize content for each client.
A multi-tenant LMS operates on the principle of creating a master course library and then granting access to content down to tenants on a client-by-client basis.
You retain total control and ownership over your intellectual property, who has access, and for how long. When it is time to update training, any changes made to shared master course content automatically cascade down to all affected tenants in one operation, saving administrative time and ensuring consistency across all clients.
When considering a multi-tenant LMS platform, make sure you choose includes support for these critical capabilities:
- SCORM compliance. Your eLearning authoring tool should publish to SCORM standards. SCORM implies that the content is being delivered to the end user via a web browser, the predominant method in use today. SCORM compliant content can be loaded and launched on any SCORM compliant LMS, is easily updated, and can be moved to another system if needed.
For example, a critical change affecting regulations in your industry requires updating all courses across all affected clients. Or maybe there is a security patch to Chrome addressing recently identified vulnerabilities in the browser’s JavaScript or CSS implementations, and you must republish and distribute updated content to your customers.
With your current non-SCORM-complaint single-tenant LMS, you make updates to each course for each client and then distribute them via email, Dropbox, or FTP so they can load your latest versions into their LMS (where they have control over your content). With a SCORM-compliant multi-tenant LMS you can accomplish all this at the push of a button. - SSO support and external LMS integration. These two capabilities are the keys to unlocking enterprise customers. SSO (single sign-on) allows employees to login to the LMS using the same digital credentials/identity used to access other protected company resources, minimizing administrative burdens on the customer while enhancing security. External LMS integration enables you to deliver content to a user population that already has its own LMS.
Your courses appear in the course catalog of the customer’s LMS – yet you still retain control over your courseware. - White Labeling. This allows each client or tenant to customize the look and feel of the LMS portal to match other elements of corporate identity. Clients can add a custom subdomain, logos, colors, and design themes to make the LMS appear as a native extension of their brand.
- Scalability: The ability to add as many client sites, or tenants, as needed as your business grows. This lets you accommodate diverse new clients without compromising performance or user experience.
Sell Training into Any Environment
Most importantly, LMS multi-tenancy removes the limitations of your current solution and lifts the ceiling on your business potential. It allows you to sell your courseware to all kinds of customers in different channels and environments, including:
- eCommerce buyers. Sell training to consumers through an eCommerce platform like Shopify, which is linked to your LMS. For example, you can add Shopify Buy Buttons to your website to simplify the purchase transaction and automatically direct learners to your courses. You can also sell courses via your social media bios.
- Small businesses. Offer training to small businesses directly through your website who buy a few courses each month for their employees.
- Mid-size companies. Provide training to bigger customers that do not have an LMS but require their own branded client site to present customized eLearning courses to their employees.
- Resellers. Allow your sales channel partners to sell courses on your behalf. Give them their own client site within your LMS so they can create their own accounts and distribute your content to their customers.
- Enterprise-class customers. Sell training into the largest organizations by integrating with their identity management system or their LMS.
With the SCORM-compliant Firmwater multi-tenant LMS hosting your content you don’t have to pick and choose which services to offer, decide which markets to attack, or say “no” to a customer ever again; you can address all of these consumption scenarios simultaneously and grow your business.
Our highly scalable solution supports all these features and distribution models while allowing you as the content provider to maintain total control and management over your property from a single interface. Take your eLearning business to the next level with Firmwater, your home for eLearning success. Contact us to schedule a demo today.