eFrontPro LMS Various Integrations
They say that no man is an island. Well, no Learning Management System should be one, either.
Whether you run a small business and train a few dozens of employees or an eLearning service catering to hundreds of thousands of students, you’ll inevitably need to integrate your training platform to several existing systems.
eFrontPro allows you to achieve just that, and it does it without forcing upon you some head-scratching, un-intuitive configuration process like other platforms do.
In this article, we’ll take a look at all the major integration options eFrontPro offers, starting from the numerous built in options and going all the way to its powerful REST and Plugin APIs that enable fully customizable integration with any kind of legacy system.
Single Sign On.
Single Sign On (or SSO for short) is the idea that you should be able to reuse the same password (and authentication mechanism) for all your enterprise services. eFrontPro comes with built in support for the two most popular SSO technologies, namely LDAP (the Open Source standard popular in the Linux world) and Active Directory (Microsoft’s variation on LDAP, popular in Windows-based shops). Federated authentication (in which there’s a central trusted web service -an “identity provider”- doing the authentication for you) is another popular SSO option, and on this front eFrontPro provides Facebook integration, letting users login to your eLearning site with their Facebook account. While LDAP and Active Directory are great (and well established) options for enterprises, this option is a good fit for eLearning portals that are open to the public, as they let users login through a service like Facebook that they already know and trust, without forcing them to create yet another account to use your service. Besides LDAP, A.D. and Facebook, eFrontPro can integrate with any identity provider that supports the industry standard SAML 2.0 authentication protocol for SSO.
Money, Money, Money...
If you run a commercial (paid) eLearning service, then you need to be able to receive and manage electronic payments for users registering for your courses. eFrontPro makes this easy, as it supports the two most popular payment gateways, PayPal and Stripe, letting you accept payments from billions of users in over 90 countries through all major credit card companies (and thousands of banks). Assuming you already have an account on one of these services, enabling your eFrontPro installation to work with couldn’t be easier, as it merely involves entering your PayPal or Stripe credentials in its settings screen.
OpenSesame Integration.
In the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, “open, sesame” is the magic phrase that opens the mouth of a cave that serves as a treasure vault. In the modern world of eLearning, OpenSesame is a leading SCORM compatible eLearning content provider, or, in Ali Baba terms, a treasure vault of high quality courses you can purchase and deploy in minutes, saving time and effort and reducing costs. eFrontPro integrates directly with OpenSesame enabling you to search for and purchase eLearning content right from within your Learning Management System administration panel.
When The Time Calls For A Conference Call.
Real-time conferencing is a great supplement to the traditional web based eLearning process, enabling remote instructor-led training and offering further interaction options between instructors and students. As you’d expect, eFrontPro covers your needs here too, by offering native support for the industry leading (Cisco's) Webex and (Open Source) BigBlueButton conference tools. In fact, eFrontPro’s WebEx and BigBlueButton support not only lets you have video conference inside your favorite Learning Management System, but you can also save a video conference for later replay, letting you easily create course videos from live lectures or archive your ILT sessions for the students that missed them.
Encode Une Fois (Or More).
Integration of third party documents and files in all kinds of formats is a core built in capability of eFrontPro that’s beyond the scope of this article. What’s in scope, however, is that eFrontPro can integrate with Encode Magic, a third party web service that allows it to handle even the most difficult automatic file encoding tasks; like transcoding obscure movie formats, or turning your PowerPoint presentations to videos or PDFs.
REST Assured In eFrontPro’s Integration Capabilities.
In this article we’ve only scratched the surface of eFrontPro’s integration options, merely covering the most popular services, tools, and platforms it has built in integration support for. Of course there will always be legacy systems (your bank’s 1970 built COBOL mainframe for example) that it doesn’t cover, or brand new systems that the eFrontPro team haven’t gotten around to integrating with yet. Plus, of course, all those custom software services that your IT team built for you. Even when it comes to those, though, eFrontPro has you covered. You’ll just need to get your hands dirty a little, and leverage its powerful REST API or its even more powerful plugin API, and you'll be able to make it talk to anything and everything you might throw at it. If these terms sound Greek to you, don’t fret. REST is a way to connect to your Learning Management System, trigger actions, and get results through simple URL-like queries, and the Plugin API is a set of PHP based extension functions that let you program any kind of functionality on top of eFrontPro. Both are very standard and established technologies, meaning you can always hire a programmer (or assign it to your IT team if you have one), to build the integration you need.
Conclusion
In this article we had a 10,000 ft look at the integration options offered by eFrontPro.
Its built in integrations should cover all but your most exotic integration needs, with the REST and Plugin API taking care of the exotic ones.
If you're interested in learning more about eFrontPro, our sales and support team is ready to answer any question you might have. Or, you can open a free Learning Management System demo account in minutes and take the industry leading Learning Management System on a test drive yourself.
This post was first published on eLearning Industry.