4 Reasons Why Your Organization Needs a Multi-Tenancy LMS

Even the simplest corporate structures will involve several separate teams. A typical corporation will have many departments, divisions, associations, partnerships, and more. With such intricate structures, they need a learning management system (LMS) that can support overarching organizational needs alongside those of individual units.

One of the features that most organizations look for in a business learning management system is the ability to easily segment their users according to their requirements. One approach to achieving this is to use a multi-tenancy corporate LMS.

Multi-tenancy is a feature available in some LMSes that allows organizations to create independent instances. With multi-tenancy, it’s possible to segment and delegate user management within the LMS. Each new instance of the platform is called a tenant, and the users assigned to manage it are called tenant admins. Just as in a building with multiple tenants, though each tenant is responsible for their own space, there’s a manager in charge of the structure itself.

Do You Need a Multi-Tenancy LMS?

The multi-tenant approach works for any use case where organizations want to delegate user management to other administrators while retaining sole control over content management. In this way, multi-tenancy can be useful for extended enterprises or conglomerates. Parent companies with an LMS can create tenant instances for each of their brands. Each brand will have its own section with tailored branding, user management, and authentication systems. This allows organizations to divide their training and learning resources in an organized, controlled way.

Let’s take a look at the main four benefits of a multi-tenancy LMS for corporate organizations.

1. A Multi-Tenancy LMS Saves You Time

An efficient system should save you significant amounts of admin time. The more you can automate otherwise manual processes, the better. In many use cases, running a multi-tenancy LMS will considerably reduce the time your team spends on administration.

Multi-tenancy functionality is user-friendly. It doesn’t require extensive onboarding in order for users to understand how to use it. Where Open LMS has introduced the feature to its corporate customers, those clients have usually only needed one or two extra sessions to fully understand it.

The small time investment at the beginning will pay off quickly. Once the feature is activated, creating tenants and assigning admin rights to users takes only a few minutes. You won’t have to spend time managing the users of each site.

Open LMS’s implementation of multi-tenancy also facilitates the sharing of content across tenants. In a single-tenancy LMS, you would usually need to import and set up the content every time you require a new instance. There isn't always an easy way of moving content between all your learning systems or pushing content to multiple systems at the same time. Instead of creating the content once and replicating it on different platforms, admins in a multi-tenancy LMS can share the content with the tenants they choose in an instant.

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2. Multi-Tenancy Allows You to Organize With Efficiency

Let’s suppose you run a company that fabricates computer equipment. You sell this equipment to other companies who will be in charge of marketing, sales, installation, and servicing. Some partners will be responsible for all of those processes, others only one.

In any scenario, you would have to provide training to all of these companies—including how to order parts, how to service them, how to set them up, and information on new and upcoming models.

In an LMS without multi-tenancy functionality, you would have to either build a site for each of your partners (not the most cost-effective option, as we explain later) or you would have to set up all your partners and their users together, without any clarity of where each user is from. Moreover, you’ll take on the burden of managing every user in the supply chain and ensuring they have access to only the right courses.

Multi-tenancy will save you all that trouble. Just create a tenant instance for each partner, assign the content they need to access, and delegate management to a tenant admin. Each partner company will then be able to brand its site to its preference and manage its users.

3. Multi-Tenancy Is Cost-Effective

An LMS typically requires not-insignificant infrastructure and a whole set of integrations to run. If an organization were to then set up multiple single-tenant LMSs for each of its use cases, it would need even more infrastructure and investment to manage all of them.

Fortunately, with a multi-tenancy LMS, organizations can just set up a tenant and save money. Open LMS doesn’t limit the number of tenants you can add. It doesn’t cost extra to add tenants either—pricing is per active user—It doesn't matter if you have 5,000 users and no tenants or 5,000 users and 20 tenants, the price would be the same.

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4. Multi-Tenancy Gives You Greater Visibility

Reports are an essential tool that help organizations make better decisions and stay on top of what’s going on internally and externally in their business. The multi-tenancy feature allows organizations to roll out overall reports but also tenant-level reports. Organizations can access statistics of how many users within a tenant have completed specific courses and how well they master them.

In a multi-tenancy LMS, you can build smart reports that limit data to shared courses or shared profile field values. You can also get reports on the percentage of users finishing a course per tenant, for example. This data is crucial in cases where organizations need to comply with legal regulations and when they need all their partners to be up to date with the latest industry information.

Choose an LMS That Addresses Your Needs

A key characteristic of multi-tenancy is delegating management to other users. At first sight, it might sound as if the management of the LMS will get more complicated with so many tenants to handle. However, it’s quite the opposite.

With Open LMS’s multi-tenancy feature, a lot of the site administration is centrally managed. Tasks such as setting up plugins, adding tenants, or ensuring the content is well configured and secure are managed centrally. When configuring or updating the content in the central management, it will also update across all the tenants that have access to it.

Multi-tenancy is a feature that does wonders in many corporate use cases. If you aren’t sure you require it for your learning solution, don’t worry: with Open LMS Work, you can start with a single-tenancy setup and then change to multi-tenancy in the future.