How to create Domains in LMS

Domain is a very important entity in the Plateau LMS. The whole security(record level access) is based on the entity(user, item, curricula, question, etc) belonging to the Domain. The LMS Admins are assigned Roles that comprise of workflows which are restricted to specific Domains. So, the LMS Admins have access(read/write/search/view) to all entities that belong to the restricted domains.

In most organizations, the source data of Organzation and Users(Employees) is maintained by the ERP system. These systems have no knowledge of the Domains. So, a common question that comes up while setting up the system is the creation of domains, the security and the mapping between the Users and Domains.

There could be many solutions to this based on the way the Organizations are setup in a Company, how the LMS Admins are tasked with managing the Users, etc. I shall go through one scenario that I have come across which may be prevalent in other companies and my proposed solution for this.

The Organizations in the ERP system are setup at each JobPosition which has direct reports. So, this leads to an Organizaton tree spanning around 9 levels deep starting with the CEO. Setting up the domains in such a scenario is tough if the access to the LMS Admins should be at the Organization level. If this is done manually then maintenance of this system will become more than handful for the LMS Admins when there is change in the Organizations.

My proposed solution is to create a Domain for each Organization automatically by the Connector when it synchronizes the Org and User data. Following are the advantages of this solution

• The access to the LMS Admins can be provided at the Organization level
• I have seen some solutions which have an Org-Domain mapping table in the ERP system which has to be maintained. This solution does not require any mapping table and zero maintenance.
• The users of a newly created Organization can access the system as soon as the Connector is run and need not wait for the LMS Admins to manually make the changes in the system.

The disadvanatges of this solution are

• The Domains are created at the Organization level. If the LMS Admins can only manage users based on the location and if the Orgs span employees across locations then this solution does not work elegantly. Some work arounds like Saved Seraches and Saved Reports have to be applied to make this work.