Overview

Every account is associated with a customer organization. When you create accounts, you can specify which organization those accounts are to be associated with. Later, you can edit accounts and change their organization.

To enable Organizations, go to the App center and install Organizations.

To see a list of the organizations, hover over Organizations from the left bar. To see a detailed view of organizations, click the List link.

Initially, there is a single default organization with the same name as your business, and all accounts are associated with that organization. The default organization is indicated with a crown icon.

You can add additional organizations that represent external customers or internal departments. For example, if you're a training company and teach courses for IBM, Oracle, and HP, you would add these three external organizations and associate the learner and manager account for these customers with their respective organizations.

The super admin of the portal can change the default organization via the Organizations listing. To change the default organization, click the radio button of the organization you'd like to make the new default organization.

Managing organizations

To add an organization, click Add from the top right.

Then enter the name and description of the organization, as well as indicate whether it's an internal organization (within your business) or an external organization (such as a customer). Here, you can also easily define the position of the organizations. Then click Save.

Once an organization is created, click Edit to change its details. Click Change picture to edit its picture, or Delete to delete it. When you delete an organization, you also automatically delete all of its associated learner and manager accounts. You cannot delete the default organization.

To import organizations, click on Import from the top right. More details on this topic can be found in the Import section.

You can establish a hierarchy for the organization on your site by adding sub-organizations to the top-level ones. For example, you can have a main organization for a regional office. Then you can add departments as sub-organization. To make organizations sub-organizations, select them and click on the Right button.

To make sub-organizations top-level organizations, select them and click on the Left button.

If you move an organization up/down/left/right, it will move all its child organizations as well to maintain the existing parent/child relationship.

You can also change the position of an organization quickly by clicking on the new "Edit" icon in the Organizations/List.

Then use the popup to alter its position.

Accounts

To see all the users in an organization, go to the Users tab.

To see the learners in an organization, click the Learners tab.

To see the instructors of an organization, click the Instructors tab.

To see the managers of an organization, click the Managers tab.

To see the administrators of an organization, click the Administrators tab.

To add users to an organization, click on the icon. More details on this topic can be found in the Import section.

To filter users, click on the icon.

You can apply multiple filters to the list.

To edit permissions for any of the roles in the Organization, navigate to Admin/Permissions from the main navigation menu. 

More details on this topic can be found in the Permissions section.

Courses

To archive/lock/unlock/publish/un-publish courses, click the "Courses" tab, select the courses, then choose the desired action:

Purchases

If e-commerce is enabled, to see all the purchases made by a particular customer organization, click the Purchases tab.

You can define per-organization currencies in the organization's Admin/E-commerce area.

The prices for items that are associated with that organization are assumed to be in that organization's currency. By default, it's set to your site currency. To change its currency, click Edit and select the currency.

There are a few things to note:

Custom visitor portal for organizations

Per-organization custom visitor portals allow you to create custom visitor views for different organizations, each with its own URL, catalog, logo, custom pages, and more. Note that only the admins from the main site can customize the visitor portals of organizations.

Per-organization portals are primarily for companies that are providing courses to a set of customers, and some of these customers are large/important enough to warrant their own customized portals. For example, let's say you have customers A, B, C, and D. Let's also say that D has 10,000 learners on your site, and you'd like to provide them with a premium experience. With per-org portals, you could create a customized portal just for D and perhaps give it a custom domain, such as https://d.mycompany.com/, instead of your main site, which might be on https://www.mycompany.com/.

If you do this, then learners in company D could go to their custom portal, see visitor content pages tailored just for that customer, see their name and logo on some of the content pages, and click catalog to see exactly the courses that you have made visible to D, log into that portal, and see a co-branded experience (perhaps with your logo and that organization's portal). Visitors to the custom portal for D would still see your favicon, get emails via your own email domain (if you're using email integration), see your logo in the upper-left when they log in, and see a color scheme that represents your company's brand, and more.

Note that if you want to create and manage a learning platform for a set of your customers, where each customer has its own separate LMS and configuration settings, then you should use Networks instead of per-organization portals.

To enable this feature, visit the App center and install "Organization portals".

After installing the feature, go to the organization in the Organizations area.

To create the custom visitor portal, click Add in the organization's Admin/Portal area.

Enter the portal's initial *.matrixlms.com URL, then click Save. Note that later you can give a custom URL.

Once the portal subdomain is chosen, you will see a panel that allows you to enable/disable the portal as well as set up its menu structure, panels, and more. Note that the portal is disabled by default, which allows you to configure and test it before enabling it and going live. You can enable the organization's portal by clicking the Enable button.

The Clear option deletes the custom portal and reverts the organization back to the main site's portal.

URL

This section displays the current URL of your organization's portal. To visit the portal, click on the URL. To change the URL for your custom portal, click 'Edit your MATRIX URL' and enter a new URL. A URL can only be a mix of letters and digits.

Using your own URL

You can set up a foreign domain so that your site can be accessed via a URL that you own. For example, you can allow your site to be accessed via http://www.mycompany.com instead of https://mycompany.matrixlms.com. This is preferable for many companies.

We offer the option to host SSL certificates for your custom sites to support SSL on all pages for free.

To set up the SSL Certificate for your custom domain, kindly get in touch with sales at sales@cypherlearning.com. Because of security concerns, we don't upload a certificate purchased via other means.

Note that the login and payments are always performed over a secure HTTPS connection, even if your custom domain does not support HTTPS by default.

There are two steps for setting up a foreign domain: (1) changing the DNS settings associated with the URL that you own and (2) entering those values into your portal area.

Step 1

Let's say that you own http://www.adpacademy.com and want to map it to your MATRIX URL http://adp.matrixlms.com.

Here's a screenshot of the DNS settings for "adpacademy.com" at GoDaddy. The last line in the CNAME area was added to perform the mapping.

Once you have updated the DNS settings, it can take an hour or so for the changes to take effect across the Internet. In this example, if you typed "http://www.adpacademy.com" into your browser and it displayed your portal, it means that the changes have become active and you're ready for the next step.

If you want to, you can map a subdomain of your domain instead. For example, to map "edu.adpacademy.com" to "adp.matrixlms.com", use "edu" instead of "www" as the CNAME host.

Step 2

Now that the DNS system is mapping your foreign domain to your MATRIX site, you must enter the mapping into your portal area so that MATRIX generates URLs based on your foreign domain instead of your original domain. For example, when you create accounts, the email invitations will use the new foreign URL.

To set up the foreign domain mapping, click Admin/Portal, then click 'Use your own URL' in the 'URL' section. Then enter the name of your foreign domain without the 'http://' prefix. In this example, we'd enter 'www.adpacademy.com'. Then click Save.

Your new portal URL will be displayed when you click Admin/Portal. If you go to the new URL, you will have to log in again because your browser associates login credentials with a specific URL. At this point, your new foreign domain is live!

To change your foreign domain, click 'Edit your own URL'. To clear your foreign domain, click 'Disable your own URL'.

How to set up your naked domain

If you set up a foreign domain for your MATRIX portal, for example, you mapped http://www.adpacademy.com to your MATRIX URL http://adp.matrixlms.com, you might want to set up the naked domain so that visitors who don't add the "www" will still be directed to your MATRIX portal. To do this, you will have to redirect the naked domain to www via your Hosting Provider (if they offer this service, or you use a naked domain redirect service like http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect), such as http://adpacademy.com, to your MATRIX portal (http://www.adpacademy.com).

Visitor view

You can configure the structure of your organization's portal just like your site's main visitor portal, with options for portal type, title, logo, pages, pictures, and more.

Portal title

You can add a title that will show up on your portal. To add a title, click Add.

Write the title and click Save.

To remove the text, click Clear.

Portal logo

You can add a logo that will show up on your organization's portal. To add a logo, click Add picture, select the picture from your computer and click Save.

To remove the picture, click on Clear.

Portal pages

Portals have default pages such as Calendar, Catalog, News, and Contact, which can be enabled. Only pages that are enabled show up in the carousel. Pages can be separately edited and enabled. To edit a page, click its icon.

Edit the content and click Save.

You can also create your own custom pages, which can be HTML pages or links to an external reference.

You can set SEO metadata for custom portal pages by clicking the icon in the SEO column of the page.

Then enter the description and keywords and click Save.

Portal menu

Here you can choose which pages to use in your portal menu.

To edit an item, click its Edit icon. Enter the title of the page, then choose the page from the list, and click Save.

To add a new menu item, click Add. Enter the title for the menu item, then select the page from the list, and click Save.

To add a submenu item, click on the arrow of the item that you want as a submenu.

For example, if you want to add Calendar as a submenu to Catalog, click on its arrow, and it will be indented.

You can replace the visitor portal menu bar with your own custom HTML. To do this, click the Custom HTML option.

Enter the HTML that you want to replace the Portal Menu with, then click Save.

The custom HTML will be displayed in the visitor portal, wrapped as follows:

<div class="custom-header">

<!-- Your custom HTML goes here ->

</div>

Remember that since the HTML will replace your visitor portal menu, you won't be able to log in unless your custom menu system includes a login option. If you mess things up, you can go back to the regular menu by adding ?disable_custom_menu=true to the visitor URL. This would allow you to log back into the Admin console and then disable the custom portal.

Portal panels

Portal panels allow a visitor portal to be composed of a stack of panels. Currently, we have support for 7 types of panels:

Carousel

A customizable picture carousel.

Counters

A graphical background with up to 3 counters.

Custom

Custom HTML.

Image blocks

Up to four images, each with a title, text, and a button.

Simple text and button

A colored background with some text and an optional button.

Clickable text blocks

Up to six clickable blocks of text.

Text and buttons

A graphical background with a title, some text, and up to 2 buttons.

To add a portal panel, click Add.

Select an option from the list. To learn more about portal panels, visit the Portal topic.

Footers

In the footer section of the portal, you have the option of adding portal pages or creating a custom HTML footer.

To edit a footer item, click its Edit icon.

Edit the title for the footer item, then select the page from the list, and click Save. To add a new footer item, click Add.

Enter the title for the footer item, then select the page from the list, and click Save.

To add a sub-footer item, click on the arrow of the item that you want to appear as a sub-footer.

For example, if you want News to appear as a sub-footer to Information, click on its arrow, and it will be indented.

Please note that there are some important differences between an organization's custom visitor portal and your main portal:

Themes for organizations

You can give each organization its own color scheme. Before you start configuring the organization's theme, make sure you have installed the "Organization Portals" app from the App Center. Then go to the organization and visit its Admin/Themes area.

Here, you can select one from the regular themes and also an accessible theme. Many of the standard themes have colored, and white-background tile variants and one of them has the accessibility options set.

If you enable the "Allow users to select separate accessibility theme via their profile settings." option, users can select the accessibility themes in the Settings area of their profile.

You can also create a custom theme by clicking "Add custom theme".

When creating a custom theme, you can select the color values for each graphic element using either the color picker or by directly entering the hex values into the input boxes.

Here you can also choose between color and white tile backgrounds.

If you select "Color", then you can select four tile colors.

If you select "White", then you have to option to choose grey or color headings and icons.

When creating a custom theme, you can enable one or both of the accessibility options and use the theme as your own accessible theme. Note that you should take care when creating an accessible theme since they should typically be high contrast and use saturated colors.

When you finish creating the theme, enter its name, then click Add. The theme also affects the look of your portal, so be sure to look at your portal after saving a theme to make sure that it also looks good.

You can add multiple custom themes. To use one of your custom themes, click its radio button under Regular or Accessible.

You can edit and delete your custom themes by clicking the appropriate icons.

To edit a standard theme, click on its name.

Then click Edit to change the colors.

When you click Save, it will be automatically saved as one of your custom themes.

A few things to note:

Configuring organizations

To configure the settings for the organizations on your portal, go to Organizations from the left bar and visit the Options area.

Please note that only Super Administrators have access to the Organizations/Options area.

Partitioning organizations

This feature allows you to partition organizations into self-contained "mini-campuses". This is useful if you have a large training organization and want to set up multiple "campuses" where each campus has its own set of admins, instructors, and learners, as well as its own course catalog. You can also have admins that can administer all the campuses.

To enable this feature, visit the Options tab and select Partition organizations.

If you enable this feature, here is what happens:

1. If a user in an organization clicks the Users tab, they will only see users in their organization.

2. If an instructor in an organization creates a course, the course is associated with the organization. If a user in an organization visits the course catalog, they will only see courses that are associated with their organization.

3. If a user in an organization creates a group, the group is associated with their organization. If a user in an organization visits the group catalog, they will only see groups that are associated with their organization.

4. An administrator in an organization can only create/manage users in their organization. If they run a report, it will only apply to users in their organization.

The "default" and "none" organizations are special, and users in those organizations operate outside of these constraints. For example, an admin in a special organization can administer *all* accounts, and an instructor in a special organization can create a course and specify which organization it applies to via Admin/Configure/Basics.

Portal administrators can allow instructors in partitioned organizations to add resources to the site-level resources library. Go to Organizations and visit the Options tab, then enable the "Allow resource sharing between organizations" option.

There are a few additional things to note:

Administrators of an organization can administer all its children

If enabled, this feature allows the administrator of an organization to also administer its child organizations (and their children, and so on), according to how organizations are indented under Organizations/List. Please note that this option is only available if organizations are partitioned, and it is not enabled by default.

In the following example, the administrator of "Future Design" would be able to administer "Boston Office" and "Boston HR" as well. The administrator of "Boston Office" would be able to administer also "Boston HR".

The cascading administrator rights include:

Managers of an organization can view organization structure

If enabled, this feature allows managers to view the entire organization structure that they are responsible for. This feature allows managers to view the information, but not to edit it. To enable this option, click the checkbox for "Managers of an organization can administer all its children". Please note that this option is only available if organizations are partitioned, and it is not enabled by default. 

Once enabled, managers of organizations that have different children organizations will be able to see these different organizations from the Organizations button in the left navigation menu.

Reports with cascading permissions

With cascading permissions enabled, the child organizations will now appear in any reports where you can select an organization when setting report parameters. These reports are:

Note: The organization option does not appear on custom reports.

Hiding organizations from each other

This feature allows you to hide organizations from each other. This is a useful feature if, for example, you have organizations, and each organization represents a client, and you don't want clients to know about each other. To enable this feature, visit the Options tab and select "Hide organizations from each other". If you enable this feature, users in organizations will not be able to:

Missing organization

This option allows you to specify what organization an account is assigned to if the organization is not provided during account creation. This may happen if the Organization field is not marked as required on the sign-up form.

By default, an account that's missing information about the organization is assigned to the organization "None". You can change this by selecting one of your organizations from the dropdown.

Custom fields

You can associate custom fields with an organization in a manner similar to that of custom course fields. To manage organization custom fields, visit the Organizations/Options/Custom Fields area and click Add.

Add the name of the field, then click Save. Note that you can add multiple custom fields.

To change the name of a custom field, click its "Edit" icon.

To delete a custom field, select it, then click Delete.

To enter the custom field values for a particular organization, visit its Admin/Basics area and click Edit.

Once the value is added, click Save.