5 essential LMS integrations every L&D team should explore

All organisations have a system that is the bedrock of their IT infrastructure. For most, that will either be Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Integrating your LMS with Microsoft or Google brings all of those features directly to your L&D programme.

That could mean incorporating software such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Google Calendar and Google Drive within your LMS.

This makes it easier for users to interact with your LMS. With calendar scheduling, document sharing and consolidated communication channels, everything is streamlined and consistent. It’s also familiar to users, which makes it easier for them to engage with L&D.

An absolutely vital LMS integration for any organisation is to sync with your HR platform. Human resources information systems (HRIS) and human capital management (HCM) systems contain key user information that is also needed for your LMS.

This includes names, job roles, departments, experience and many other datapoints. Updating this information manually on an LMS is a laborious and time-consuming administrative task.

By integrating your LMS with Workday, BambooHR, SAP SuccessFactors, ADP or another HR system, you can immediately sync user data. This means it will be added to, updated in and deleted from your LMS without any need for manual admin. This saves significant time and resources that can be invested in other aspects of L&D.

Adding single sign-on to an LMS has several benefits, including higher LMS usage and fewer IT support requests. 

SSO tools, such as Okta, Azure Active Directory and Google SSO, make it easier for your users to access the LMS. By logging in with a username and password that they use for multiple systems, they can quickly access e-learning. This instantly removes some of the friction that might cause learners to think twice before engaging with L&D.

It also makes your LMS more secure. With fewer login credentials to remember, users are less likely to take security risks, such as writing their LMS passwords in a document.

Integrating SSO with your LMS also saves time and resources. By making it easier for users to log in, it also reduces the number of forgotten password requests that LMS admins or IT support staff have to deal with.

For organisations that are keen to retain as much face-to-face learning as possible, integrating an LMS with video conferencing software is an easy and cost-effective way to achieve that.

LMS integrations with platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and particularly specialised virtual classroom software, like BigBlueButton, enable you to deliver live learning events. That means your learners can attend webinars, take part in instructor-led sessions and complete live assessments in your LMS.

Engaging your learners with interactive video, audio, slides, whiteboards, chat and screen sharing in real-time helps to boost learning outcomes. It also potentially reduces travel expenses associated with achieving the same experience in a classroom.

Your LMS contains more data and analytics about your L&D programme than you’ll ever be able to use. But integrating a business intelligence tool with your LMS makes it easier to create advanced reports.

While LMS platforms such as Totara and Moodle Workplace already contain powerful visual reporting systems, BI platforms such as Power BI, Tableau and Google Looker help you to make greater sense of this data.

Integrating LMS data with BI platforms makes it easier to share data with other parts of your organisation. It means you can quickly and efficiently deliver insights in a way that is consistent with how BI is used across your organisation. This makes it simpler for you and others to view LMS insights within the wider context of your organisation and its goals. 

It also gives the reassurance of knowing that important data from your L&D programme is being fed into organisational decision-making processes.