Speaker 1: Hey there, this is Sachin Choudhury from Paradiso Learning. In this video, we're going to talk about integrating your LMS system with your HRMS or your ERP system. So, why do we need to integrate these two systems? During our hundreds of LMS implementation, one thing Paradiso realized is that integration is the key for any enterprise application. So by integrating your LMS with your HRMS system, you're able to have the same data in both the system. It helps you in compliance. It saves you a lot of manual time. It also helps you to maintain the integrity of your data and also you have a backup of your data. If something were to happen, you have the data in two different systems. Once you decide that you want to integrate your LMS with your ERP or your HRMS system, then what do you do? So first of all, you need to understand there are three types of integration, three main types. First thing is the SSO, the single sign-on. Single sign-on is basically once you log into one system, you can use the same login to log into another system without having to log in. Basically, you log in once and you're able to log into multiple systems. So if your employees log into your HR portal or your ERP portal, then there will be a tab called training and once they click on it, they will immediately, without having to log in, enter into the LMS, the Learning Management System, without having to log in again. This saves a lot of time for your employees and also it increases the engagement of your users. So no more, well, I didn't know the URL, I didn't know how to log in, that's why I couldn't complete the courses, none of these excuses come in. So SSO is one of the first things you've got to look at, whether it's from your customer portal, your employee portal, your intranet, anywhere you can have SSO with the external system and your LMS is very, very profitable in terms of getting your user engagement high. So how do you do SSO? There are a few different ways. One is you can follow the industry standard. There are security standards to be able to do SSO between one system and another, such as SAML, S-A-M-L, or OAuth. These are just the popular ones. There are many other industry standards out there to do SSO between one system and another. SAML tends to be very secure and most of the enterprise level LMSs, such as Paradiso LMS or most of the HRMS systems out there, such as Workday or ERP systems, such as SAP, Oracle, they all support SAML or OAuth. So now what's the second way of doing the SSO? Let's say you have a homegrown ERP system or HRMS system or some portal which doesn't support these industry standards. Then what you can do is you can have a custom single sign-on module built, which is basically built on security tokens between the two systems, and your security programmers will know that. In Paradiso, we support about 10 different kinds of security standards, including SAML, OAuth. We also have built a lot of the custom token-based single sign-on. So now let's talk about other integrations other than SSO. So the other thing you want to do is the user sync and the course data sync. So user sync is basically if you have your HRMS system, your LMS system here, then when you enter a new user in your HRMS system, when you onboard or off-board that person, when he exits, you want to be able to have the same user data in your HRMS as in your LMS. So the data flows from your HRMS into your LMS. That's called user sync. And it's not just about the user data, where it's just first name, last name. In fact, you can put and synchronize a lot of other data, such as their department, the location, the language, their manager's name. All of this data exists in your master record, which could be your HRMS system or your ERP or your intranet. So use that data and let it sync with your LMS. When the LMS has all this user data, it's able to do a lot of automation. So with Paradiso LMS, we have something called a rules engine, where you can build rules such as if a user has this particular department, this particular location, then automatically enroll them into these courses. Or if the user joins, then within seven days from the joining date, they need to complete their onboarding course. If not, their manager gets a notification. And if the manager doesn't take an action, then the HR gets a notification. You can build these kind of rules. So user synchronization is extremely useful, where the data is synchronizing from your HRMS into your LMS. So the next thing you want to integrate is your course data sync. So in the course data sync, as users start to complete the courses and activities in the courses or learning path or a curriculum, in the LMS, as they start completing those activities, you want to be able to give that report automatically to your HRMS system. So nobody has to do it manually. So in the course data sync, what happens is the data goes from your LMS into your HRMS system, so the HRMS system can use it for reporting, for compliance, for saving a lot of manual time, and also as a backup if you were to change the LMS or something were to happen to your LMS, you have the course completion data in your HRMS. So now you understand that user sync and course data sync is important, how do you go about doing it? Well, to be able to do this integration, you have two different ways. One is synchronous integration, another is asynchronous integration. So in synchronous integration, it happens real time. What does that mean? So let's say you hire a new employee. So that employee gets onboarded and a user account gets created in your LDAP or Active Directory and eventually in your HRMS. So as soon as that user record gets created, the API gets called immediately, which sends that data into your LMS within seconds. That's called synchronous integration. And the same thing with the course data integration, where as soon as a user completes a course, that information of when he completed the course, what was his score, and how long it took him to complete the course, all that data immediately goes into your HRMS system. This is called synchronous integration. Now let's talk about asynchronous integration. So the asynchronous integration happens where the data is processed in batches. And this processing can happen at certain intervals. And this interval could be one hour, six hours, every 12 hours, or every 24 hours, or every month, whatever you decide during the program. So the asynchronous integration between your LMS and HRMS runs at certain intervals. So the disadvantage is you have to wait for that particular batch or that particular job, scheduled job, to run to be able to get updated data. And practically speaking, that's usually not a problem because you don't keep checking your HRMS every minute, or you don't need up-to-date information every minute to minute. In certain cases you do, then you use the synchronous integration. But as much as possible, try to use the asynchronous integration between your LMS and HRMS system. So how do you go about doing this asynchronous integration? Well there are two primary ways. One is through APIs, where you create a scheduled job on both sides. And these jobs are scheduled tasks, or CRANs they're called. These run at certain intervals using the APIs, and that's how the data gets transferred. And to be able to use this method, both the systems, LMS and HRMS, need to have good APIs which can send the data between the two systems. Well, sometimes you don't have the APIs in the HRMS system. In Paradiso we have hundreds of APIs to be able to sync with different systems, but there are many LMSs or many HRMS or homegrown systems who don't have the APIs to be able to use. Then what do you do? Then you have a second option, which is to use a data file. A data file could be a CSV file or XML file. What you do is, you export this file from one system, you put it on a shared server, a shared file system, every hour or every five hours, whatever you decide. And then the other system picks it up from this system and imports it in the other system. And that's how the two systems get integrated without having any API available. So let's take an example, for example, user sync. So you have your HRMS system. Every night at 12 o'clock, it will export all its current users and the changes which has happened in the user data into a CSV file and put that file in a common file system which is secured. And then at 1230, this LMS will have a program running, which will go and fetch this file and import all the data throughout the night in the LMS system. So when you wake up in the morning, all the latest user data is available in the LMS. Same thing with course data completion, the LMS will export all the changes which has happened, which user have completed the course, which users have passed their deadline to complete the course and still haven't completed the course. All of that course completion, course activity data gets exported from your LMS into the file system and then gets from here, it gets imported into your HRMS system. So this is just a quick, short introduction to what you can do with your HRMS and LMS integration. Obviously, there are a lot more details and a lot more different use cases we can build around this, so reach out to us and we'll be happy to give you a white paper and more information about how to integrate HRMS and LMS.