Meeting the needs of diverse user groups: multitenancy in an LMS

As learning and development trends continue to show companies consolidating their LMSs, L&D professionals are met with new challenges. The appeal of consolidation is a no-brainer: reporting all in one place, easy dashboard views into company-wide productivity, and a streamlined, branded look and feel.

But what about your channel partners, distributors, and customers? It doesn’t make sense to offer the same LMS to customers that you do to your internal employees. Your distribution partners have an entirely different brand and culture. Why should they be subjected to the functionality and look of your internal LMS?

This issue is how companies have amassed so many LMSs in the first place. Rather than buying and implementing a new LMS for every sales channel, distributor, and channel partner, you can consider consolidation through a multi-tenant LMS solution.

Multitenancy, which is the ability to support distinctly diverse user groups within one LMS, isn’t just for enormous companies with endless L&D budgets and hundreds of thousands of learners. Every company that has channel partners, distributors, customers, and employees, should look for this function when purchasing an LMS. It allows companies to organize their training initiatives and track and prove noticeably increased ROI on those initiatives.

Roundtable can create sub-instances of your LMS that look exactly like your company’s brand, or appear completely unique, depending on which user group is in your system. Sub-instances and multitenancy systems are completely brandable and customized, making instances easily marketable to organizations, or “tenants”, who share similar objectives and audiences.

What does multitenancy look like?

Assigned Audiences

A multitenancy LMS allows you to designate different levels within your tenant organizations and partners. You can assign custom content and learning plans to various organizations and their learners. Custom workflows will ensure that everyone in the LMS receives the right training at the right time.

Reporting that Drives ROI

Increased reporting across internal and external learners will allow you to see what training works and how it impacts your entire business strategy. Your distribution partners will now have mandatory training, as well as a library of resources that will help them to better understand and distribute your product. While that tenant can see reporting for his or her organization, the reporting data will also roll up to the LMS administrator who can see what’s really driving the company’s bottom line.

Branded UI

Each tenant can create its own look and feel of the LMS user interface. In some cases, this might mean changing out a logo. In others, tenants may require a different navigation structure. This is where working with a custom LMS company like Roundtable can be extremely beneficial.

Profitable and Sustainable Model

For a small “rental” fee, your tenants reap all the benefits of everything your LMS has to offer – delivery, accessibility, tracking of content, professional development, and other resources. Best of all, they can uniquely brand their LMS and even host their own content.