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, 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 gate access by partner tier.
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.
Configure the connection
Open Partner settings → Training / LMS.
Turn it on
A single switch gates the whole path. Until you enable it, every sign-on request is denied — which is what an organization that has never configured an LMS should do.
Set Provider to the name of your LMS (for example, Skilljar). It is display-only: it is the name partners see on the button that sends them there.
What to give your LMS
Three values are generated for you and are read-only here. Copy them into your LMS’s SAML configuration:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Sign-in URL | Where your LMS sends users to authenticate. |
| Metadata URL | The identity-provider metadata document. |
| Identity provider entity ID | The identifier your LMS should expect assertions from. |
What to take from your LMS
Three values come the other way, from your LMS’s service-provider metadata. Type them in here:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| SP entity ID | Your LMS’s own identifier. |
| ACS URL | Where your LMS receives the assertion. |
| SLO URL | Where your LMS handles single logout. |
What Suger sends about each user
The tab shows the exact attribute mapping — each attribute, the value Suger sends, and whether it is required — so you can match it against what your LMS expects before anyone tries to sign in.
Launch URL template
This is the setting most worth understanding, because skipping it produces a confusing result rather than an error.
A course destination is an ordinary deep link, and whether your LMS asks who the visitor is remains your LMS’s decision. If the destination page is publicly readable, your LMS has no reason to challenge for identity — so the partner arrives signed out, on the right page, and has to find a Sign in button themselves. Single sign-on was configured correctly and still appears not to work.
The fix is to send the learner at your LMS’s own login entry point and let it carry them onward. That makes the LMS initiate SAML, which hands off to Suger — silently, because a partner clicking from Suger already has a session.
Enter an absolute http(s) URL containing at least one placeholder:
| Placeholder | Substitutes |
|---|---|
{path} | The destination’s path and query, for example /certification-exam. |
{destination} | The whole destination URL. |
Both are substituted URL-encoded. For Skilljar, whose /auth/login honours a next parameter:
https://your-site.skilljar.com/auth/login?next={path}Leaving it empty is valid. The destination then opens exactly as it did before, with whatever sign-in behaviour your LMS applies to it.
Restrict by tier
Optionally narrow access to partners in specific tiers.
Completion sync
The tab’s Completion sync section controls whether completions recorded in your LMS flow back into Suger.
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:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Course name | What partners see, for example Harness Partner Onboarding. |
| Destination link | The URL in your LMS. |
| LMS | Which system it lives in. |
| Category | Where it sits in your catalogue. |
| Estimated minutes | Shown to partners as the expected time. |
The destination is pinned to a version, so editing the course later does not silently repoint partners who are already working through it.
What partners see
On an external course the partner gets a single button — Open in {your LMS} — at every stage. There is no Start / Resume / Review progression, because Suger is not running the lessons and has nothing to resume.
What you can still monitor
An external course reports that it was opened, not 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.
That is a real limit, not a gap to work around: the lessons run in your LMS, so it is your LMS that knows how far a learner has got. Use completion sync if you need that back in Suger.
Troubleshooting
A partner lands on “access denied”
A partner refused access sees a Suger-branded page carrying a reference code. The code is deliberately opaque — it identifies the reason without telling an unauthenticated visitor which of several checks they failed.
Ask the partner for the code. The usual causes are:
- external LMS single sign-on is not enabled;
- the partnership is not Active;
- the partner’s tier is not in the allowed list.
The partner arrives signed out
Set the launch URL template. See above — the destination link alone does not make your LMS ask who the visitor is.
Related
- Build a Training Course
- Share and Monitor Partner Training Courses
- Take a Training Course
- Partner Tiers
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