Connect an External LMS

Keep your courses where they already live, and let partners reach them from Suger without a second login.

Overview

If your partner training already lives in a learning management system (LMS), such as Skilljar or another platform that supports SAML, you do not have to rebuild it in Suger. Connect the LMS once and Suger can:

• publish external courses that are a link into your LMS;
• sign partners in on arrival, through SAML single sign-on, so there is no second password;
• record who opened each course, and when;
• with Skilljar, read completions back, so a finished course completes in Suger on its own (Completion sync).

Suger is the identity provider in this arrangement and your LMS is the service provider. Your LMS remains the authority on course content and completion.

Here’s what happens when a partner opens an external course, once everything below is in place:

Because the partner is already signed in to Suger, the SAML exchange is usually invisible — the course simply opens.

Setup is guided, and it starts with a conversation. To get started, contact your Suger representative. Self-service setup isn’t available yet.

Before You Start

Check these before you pick a date:

• Your LMS plan includes SAML single sign-on, and you — or someone on your team — can reach its SSO settings. Some vendors offer SSO only on certain plans, or switch it on through their support team.
• Your LMS recognizes returning learners by email address. Suger sends each learner’s email address as the SAML Name ID. If your LMS matches learners on anything else, an existing learner can end up with a second account and lose their history.
• Your partner users have accepted their Suger invitations. Single sign-on can only sign in people who have a Suger account.

Configure the connection

Four steps connect the two systems. Suger handles the identity side; you configure your LMS and record both sides in Suger.

Step 1: Request the connection

Contact your Suger representative and tell them which LMS you use. Suger sends you four values:

Step 2: Configure your LMS

1. Open your LMS’s SAML single sign-on settings and create a configuration.

2. Import the metadata rather than pasting the certificate by hand — from the metadata URL or its XML file, if your LMS offers that. The Metadata URL field in Suger gives the same advice.

3. Map the attributes to these exact names:

   Attribute	What Suger sends
   Email	The learner’s email address. It is also the SAML Name ID.
   FirstName	The learner’s first name in Suger.
   LastName	The learner’s last name in Suger.

   All three are required. Company and job title are not sent.

4. Set the Name ID format to email address. This is how your LMS recognizes a returning learner.

5. Save the configuration, then send these values from your LMS to your Suger representative:

   • Service provider entity ID
   • Assertion consumer service (ACS) URL
   • Single logout (SLO) URL

Step 3: Record the values in Suger

1. Go to Suger Console, then Settings.
2. Click Partner, then Training / LMS.
3. Under LMS, choose Skilljar or Other (SAML). Single sign-on works with either; completion sync needs Skilljar. Optionally, enter a Display name, such as the name of your partner academy — this settings page uses it to label its sections. The name partners see on a course’s button comes from that course’s own LMS field — see Publish an external course.
4. Under Give these to {your LMS}, enter the Sign-in URL, Metadata URL, and Identity provider entity ID Suger sent you. Copy the entity ID exactly as the metadata shows it. Test connection flags a mismatch, which your LMS would otherwise reject without saying why.
5. Under Get these from {your LMS}, enter the Service provider entity ID, Assertion consumer service (ACS) URL, and Single logout (SLO) URL from Step 2. Suger keeps them as a record of what was exchanged, so a broken connection can be diagnosed later.
6. Click Save at the bottom of the page.
7. Click Test connection. It reads the values you saved, so save first.

Test connection fetches the metadata from your metadata URL, which must be an https:// address. The result reads Metadata looks correct or Needs attention, with each check listed separately:

The test checks the metadata only — it does not sign anyone in. If the test finds a signing certificate, Download certificate saves it as a .pem file, for an LMS that asks for the certificate on its own; until then the button stays disabled.

The tab’s What we send about each user section lists the same three attributes as Step 2.

Step 4: Turn on single sign-on

Do this last, once both sides are configured.

1. In Training / LMS, switch External LMS single sign-on on, then click Save.
2. Enable the SSO configuration in your LMS.

The switch turns the connection on in Suger. It doesn’t change where a course opens: Open in … always sends partners to the course’s destination link. Completion sync has a switch of its own, so turning single sign-on off doesn’t stop completions coming back.

Completion sync

Completion sync reads completions back out of your LMS, so an external course finishes in Suger on its own. When your LMS reports that a partner finished a course, their enrollment becomes Completed, a journey’s Complete course step waiting on that course ticks, and a journey that finishes this way can promote the partner’s tier if it carries a tier outcome.

It works with Skilljar. With Other (SAML) selected, single sign-on and open tracking work as before, but completions can’t be read.

Completions come back two ways:

Set up completion sync

1. In Training / LMS, set LMS to Skilljar.
2. Switch Completion sync on and enter your Training domain, for example courses.example.com. Suger never guesses it: your LMS’s API is scoped to one training domain while one key reaches every domain in the account, so this is what keeps the sync pointed at the right site. Click Save at the bottom of the page.
3. Paste an API key from your LMS and click the Save button next to the field. Create it as a read-only key — in Skilljar, tick Read Only when you generate it. Suger only ever reads from your LMS, so a full-access key would grant delete rights nothing here uses.
4. Click Sync now to test the setup. It runs the same check the schedule does, straight away, and reports what it did — “Applied 3 completions.” or “Sync ran. No new completions to apply.” — plus how many it passed over as unmatched course, unknown learner, or not enrolled. A key your LMS rejects fails here, with your LMS’s own message, instead of failing quietly later.
5. Set up the completion webhook.
6. Link each external course to the matching course in your LMS. See Publish an external course.

The key is stored encrypted and never shown again; the field shows a Stored badge instead. To remove it, empty the field and click Clear, which switches completion sync off at the source.

If completion sync is on but something it needs is missing — Skilljar isn’t selected, or no training domain is saved — a warning under the switch says which. The section also shows when Suger last checked, or Not checked yet.

Set up the completion webhook

The webhook is the half Suger can’t configure for you: creating it is a change in your LMS, and the key you gave Suger is read-only. Under Completion webhook:

1. Click Generate secret and copy the secret straight away. It’s shown once and can’t be retrieved; if you lose it, generate another and update your LMS.
2. In Skilljar, create a webhook with the Target URL shown on the page. Add a custom header whose name is the Custom header name shown on the page, with the secret as its value. Skilljar doesn’t sign its webhook deliveries, so this header is what proves a delivery is genuinely yours.
3. Set the event type to COURSE_COMPLETION, or leave it empty to send every event — Suger ignores the ones it doesn’t need.

Once a secret exists, the badge next to Completion webhook reads Secret generated instead of Not set up, and the button reads Generate a new secret. Generating a new secret immediately stops deliveries that still carry the old one, until you update Skilljar.

How completions are matched

A completion counts only when Suger can match all three of these. Anything it can’t match is counted and passed over, never treated as an error:

A partner doesn’t have to open the course from Suger first. Someone who went straight to your LMS is still recorded as having finished, as long as they’re enrolled in Suger.

Re-running is safe. A completion is recorded once. Running Sync now again, or getting the same completion from both the webhook and the scheduled check, changes nothing and never ticks a journey step twice.

Publish an external course

Link external LMS is a third kind of course, alongside the built-in editor and SCORM uploads. See Build a Training Course.

An external course is only a destination, so it asks for less:

To link a course you’ve already created, open it in the course builder. Course in your LMS carries a Not linked badge until you pick one, and changing the link applies to the next published version.

The destination is pinned to a version, so editing the course later does not silently repoint partners who are already working through it.

You don’t need a single sign-on connection to publish an external course. Without one, Open in … sends partners straight to the destination link, and your LMS signs them in however it normally does.

What partners see

On an external course the partner gets a single button — Open in followed by the course’s LMS name — at every stage. There is no Start / Resume / Review progression, because Suger is not running the lessons and has nothing to resume.

Verify Before Announcing It

Before you tell partners, run these checks with a real partner user:

1. The partner clicks Open in … on a course in Suger and lands on that course page in your LMS, already signed in.
2. An existing learner signs in and still sees their completion history, with no new learner record. If not, stop and recheck the Name ID setting in Step 2.
3. A partner on a different device, with no existing session, can sign in.
4. In Suger, the course’s Enrollments view shows that learner’s last-opened date and open count.
5. If you use completion sync, finish a linked course as that partner, then check that their enrollment reads Completed in the course’s Enrollments view.

What you can still monitor

An external course reports that it was opened and, with completion sync, that it was finished — never how far through it a partner is. Suger keeps a per-enrollment open ledger, so Share and Monitor Training shows an Opened status and a count of how many partners have opened it — never a percentage complete.

Tell your team these limits before go-live:

• Nothing in between comes back. An external enrollment is Not Started, Opened, or — once your LMS reports a completion through completion sync — Completed. It never reads In Progress. In a course’s Enrollments view, each learner shows Last opened with a date and an open count instead of a progress bar.
• “Opened” means “clicked the link.” The open is recorded when the partner clicks Open in …, before they reach your LMS — so it includes people who never got past your LMS’s sign-in page.
• Certificates can’t be earned from an external course, even with completion sync on. You can attach one, but Suger issues a certificate only for a passed quiz or a completed SCORM package, and an external course has neither.
• Without completion sync, journey steps and tier conditions on an external course have to be completed by hand. With it, a Complete course step ticks itself once the completion comes back.
• Signing out of your LMS doesn’t end the Suger session.

That is a real limit, not a gap to work around: the lessons run in your LMS, so your LMS is the only place that knows how far a learner has got. Completion sync brings back the one fact it reports — that they finished.

Troubleshooting

The partner arrives signed out

Check that External LMS single sign-on is switched on and saved in Suger (Step 4), and that the SSO configuration is enabled in your LMS. Open in … always sends partners to the course’s destination link; whether that page asks a visitor to sign in is decided by your LMS’s own settings.

Related

• Build a Training Course
• Share and Monitor Partner Training Courses
• Take a Training Course