3 Common Skilljar LMS Integrations

With so many Learning Management System (LMS) vendors to choose from, the ability to integrate workflows and data with your company's processes is just as important as delivering a great learning experience. At Skilljar, we've found that creating flexible APIs and webhooks have given our clients the widest range of options to support their technical needs. In this post, we describe three of the most common LMS integrations between Skilljar and other systems.

1. Single Sign On

Single Sign On (SSO) enables your trainees to use existing credentials from another application to sign in to your Skilljar training portal. By far, this is the most requested and implemented integration for Skilljar. SSO enables you to create more seamless experiences from your website application, and saves your trainees the hassle of creating a new account and remembering another password. Removing barriers to entry can also increase training adoption. Trainees are more likely to actually start and continue to engage with the training material.

Skilljar has implemented Single Sign On in such a way that trainees can login with pre-existing credentials or create brand new ones in your system. You can also launch on Skilljar without Single Sign On and choose to add it later. Your trainees will have a seamless transition and retain all their learning data automatically.

2. Sending trainee data to Salesforce

In many companies, Salesforce.com has become the authoritative source of record for all customer data, from first contact as a sales lead, to qualified opportunity, to initial onboarding, and finally to ongoing customer success and health. As a result, integrations between Skilljar and Salesforce are of paramount importance for many companies. There are three ways that companies generally perform this integration.

The first is by using Skilljar's webhooks. In this model, Skilljar posts new training events (new trainees, course registrations, course completions, and quiz completions) to an endpoint. Our clients then update Salesforce records accordingly. This approach is extremely flexible in that our clients have complete control over how and when to add events to Salesforce according to their custom SFDC instance. In addition, there are technical advantages in not creating dependencies or sharing secure data between the systems.

The second is by syncing periodically using Skilljar's APIs. In this approach, all Salesforce user records are synced with Skilljar's users and courses at some frequency (typically daily). This may be suitable for smaller organizations who prefer not to use webhooks or have a sync framework already in place.

Finally, there are third party systems that integrate with Salesforce, such as Marketo. In these instances, Skilljar will integrate with Marketo (for example, through the Munchkin script) and then Marketo will sync with Salesforce. If the third party system is based on Javascript tracking and already synced with Salesforce, this approach may work out-of-the-box.

3. Enrolling trainees in courses

Finally, there are many cases where companies wish to enroll trainees in courses via API. For example, if a company already has an e-commerce platform for purchasing training, they can automatically authorize course access when the trainee completes the purchase. Another example is assigning courses when the trainee performs certain actions on your site, for example signing up for the first time, progressing to new areas of functionality, or falling below a minimum community rating.

For the opposite directional flow, Skilljar supports two options for revoking users. First, you can include an automatic expiration window when you initially enroll a trainee via API. This will automatically revoke the user when the expiration date is hit. Or, you can call our API a second time to deactivate the user.

Conclusion

The success of your online training program includes not just delivering great content, but also enabling seamless workflows for both your internal stakeholders and your external trainees. These three common LMS integrations above are just a few examples of how Skilljar can help you streamline and automate your training activities.