What is Single Sign-On?

Have you ever gotten a request for SSO from one of your prospects or clients? Were you wondering what SSO is all about and if Firmwater LMS supports it?

On a daily basis, LMS users frequently provide their credentials to the LMS to access their account. Single Sign-On eliminates this step. Large organizations like to use SSO so that their employees only have to log in once to their corporate network, and then access many different apps, platforms, and services without having to provide their username and password again.

Example: A great example is a Google account. Logging in once provides automatic access to your Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, YouTube, and Google Photos accounts.

One of our customers has a large, multinational client that they deliver their time-management courses to. SSO was a requirement for rolling the courses out globally to all of their employees. We recently worked with them to support this.

As a result, you can now offer greater value to your clients by providing not just online training courses and a solid platform, but also a more efficient way to access the system.

Benefits – Why would your client want SSO?

SSO provides a smoother user experience and efficiency for both staff and employees. SSO lowers cybersecurity risks, lowers help desk requests and makes user account management easier.

Single Sign-On and Firmwater LMS

So far, we have successfully configured SSO with environments that use Active Directory (AD) and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) — Microsoft’s directory services for Windows networks. Our implementation is standards-based and should easily support more environments.

You may have noticed a new ‘Single Sign-On’ configuration page in the LMS. Currently, this just indicates whether SSO is enabled for a site, and for those that are, provides an indication that things are working. We plan to enhance this page so that you can configure SSO for a site yourself, but we’d like to get experience with a few more diverse environments first.

If your clients are interested in using SSO for Firmwater LMS access, contact our support team for more details.

Single Sign-On is available for our Premium and Tailor Made pricing packages.