Training for people who don’t work for you
Give each outside company its own space, seats and local managers, choose how each audience signs in, and keep your own staff’s records separate from everyone else’s.
At a glance
- Organization per company
- Seat limits
- Portal for outside managers
- Sign-in per audience
- Exams without enrollment
Extended enterprise training means teaching people your HR system has never heard of: the contractor crew arriving on site next Monday, the supplier’s quality team, the dealer’s service technicians, the customer’s administrators. You need them trained, sometimes before they are allowed through the gate, but you cannot provision them like employees and you cannot let one supplier see another supplier’s staff list.
LMS Advisor handles this with organizations. Each outside company gets its own space with a seat limit, its own managers who add and remove their people, and courses assigned with due dates. You run one catalog and one platform, and every audience sees only what belongs to it. Your employees can stay in branches alongside, on the same install.
Why outside audiences break internal LMS setups
Outsiders don’t fit your directory
Contractors and supplier staff are not in your HR system or identity provider, so IT either creates guest accounts by hand or refuses.
Every company wants its own view
A dealer principal wants to see their technicians’ progress and nobody else’s. Sending them a filtered export every week does not scale past five dealers.
Proof has to exist before arrival
A contractor must complete the site safety induction before their first shift, and the gate supervisor needs a way to check.
Contracts come with seat counts
A supplier agreement covers twenty trained people, not unlimited sign-ups, and someone has to enforce that.
Separate spaces, one catalog
Create an organization for each outside company with its own seat limit and managers. Assign courses with due dates, let their managers handle their own people from a portal, and pick the sign-in method that suits each audience.
Organization per company
Each contractor, supplier, dealer or customer gets its own members, managers, assigned courses and notes.
Seat limits
Set how many people each company can enroll. Managers count as seats, and imports stop at the limit and report it.
Portal for outside managers
A supervisor at the outside company adds, creates, imports and removes their own learners, with permissions you set per manager.
Sign-in per audience
Multiple SAML 2.0 identity providers, Google sign-in, passkeys, token SSO from your portal, or plain registration.
Exams without enrollment
Invite a contractor to a standalone exam by email with OTP access. No course enrollment or full account needed.
Verifiable certificates
Every certificate has a public verification page showing valid, expiring soon or expired.
Structuring outside companies, identity and access
Organizations are the unit of separation
An organization in LMS Advisor stands for one outside company. It holds a name, domain, billing contact and notes, a seat limit, a member list and a set of assigned courses. Each assignment can carry a due date and a mandatory flag, and the organization report shows every member’s status with overdue items flagged. You can export that report for the company’s account manager or for your own contract review.
A learner belongs to one organization at a time. That rule is deliberate: when a technician moves from one dealer to another, you move them, and their history does not end up in two companies’ reports.
Inside the organization, you choose one or more managers and decide what each can do. The four permissions are assigning courses, removing members, adding existing learners and creating new learner accounts. A large supplier might get full self-service. A two-person contractor might get none, with your team doing the admin. Managers work from their own portal and never see other organizations.
Where employees fit
Your own staff can sit in branches on the same installation, with branch isolation keeping location managers inside their own scope. Content is shared by assignment, so one safety induction course can go to your plant staff and to three contractor organizations without maintaining copies.
Choosing a sign-in method for each audience
A large dealer group with its own identity provider can connect over SAML 2.0. LMS Advisor supports several identity providers side by side, each with its own role mapping and auto-provisioning settings. Smaller companies usually do fine with email and password, Google sign-in or passkeys. If you already run a customer or partner portal, token-based SSO signs people in from it. For a one-off check, such as a contractor safety test, the Exams module sends an email invitation and lets the candidate in with an email or phone OTP, no course enrollment needed.
When the audience already has an LMS
Some partners want your course inside their own LMS. LMS Advisor acts as an LTI 1.3 tool, so their platform can launch your course and receive the grade back.
What we don’t claim
Multi-tenant installs, where each audience gets a fully separate environment, exist but are early and limited. We do not offer white-label or reseller portals. For most programs, organizations give the separation you need. For audience-specific detail, see partner training and customer training.
Adding a new outside company, step by step
Create the organization
Add the company with its domain, billing contact and a seat limit that matches your agreement.
Assign the required courses
Pick the courses this company needs, set due dates and mark the ones that are mandatory.
Appoint their manager
Make their supervisor an organization manager and choose which of the four permissions they get.
Let them bring their people
The manager adds learners or pastes a list of emails. New accounts receive a welcome email with sign-in details.
Check before they start
Review the organization report for overdue items, or verify an individual’s certificate on its public page.
Outside audiences teams train
Contractor site inductions
Safety and site-rules training completed before the first shift, with a certificate the gate supervisor can verify.
Supplier quality programs
Quality standards and inspection procedures assigned to each supplier, with seat limits written into the supplier agreement.
Dealer and distributor technicians
Service procedures and product updates for each dealer, with the dealer’s service manager handling their own staff.
Customer administrator training
Admin courses for each customer account, reported per customer so account managers see who has been trained.
What the program owner gets
- Outside learners trained without adding them to your directory
- Each company manages its own people within limits you set
- One course serves employees and outside audiences alike
- Proof of training that anyone can check
- Seat commitments enforced by the platform, not a spreadsheet
Features doing the work
Questions about external learners
Can customers, contractors and employees use the same LMS?
Can an outside company manage its own learners?
How do we limit how many people a supplier can enroll?
Do outside learners need accounts in our identity provider?
How can a site supervisor check a contractor is trained?
Can we give each audience a completely separate environment?
Can we charge outside audiences for training?
Plan your outside audiences with us
List the outside companies you train and how many people each sends. We will show organizations, seat limits and the outside manager portal on a demo install.
- Personalized demo
- Deployment and security answers
- Reply within one business day