A Subaccount is:
Supplementary Bridge accounts that can be created as additional accounts connected to your main account (but completely autonomous with the ability to manage users and content separately).
Learn how to create a subaccount.
A Smart Group is:
A mechanism in Bridge that allows for the use of imported user data to automate affiliation with a group as a means of (1) automating delivery of specific content to those learners and (2) reporting.
Learn how to create a smart group.
One of the biggest decisions you can make when setting up your Bridge account is how you intend to leverage subaccounts and smart groups.
Our subaccount feature is incredibly powerful as it gives Account Admins a lot of freedom to delegate admins to separate parts of the tool with restricted access to data in other accounts.
Optimal use cases for subaccounts include:
- Content distributor who is selling B2B
- Franchises
- A parent company with multiple autonomous subsidiaries
- A decentralized corporation with different business units
- Need to deliver compliance training to contractors (especially if you are using SSO in your root account and your contractors are not part of that identity provider)
- Partner training portals
- Customer “academies”
If you are a larger or more segregated company with departments who want autonomy over their learning, we do suggest giving this a thorough read before making any quick decisions when it comes to “subs.” Groups in Bridge can accomplish many of the desirable traits of subaccounts while keeping the hierarchy intact and preserving the centralization of learner data a bit more concisely.
What to know about subaccounts:
- The URL will be the name of the subaccount with a hyphen and then the name of the root account
- The root account is called Sleigh and the subaccount is called Partner Academy (partneracademy)
- The subaccount will be named partneracademy-sleigh.bridgeapp.com
- Vanity URLs cannot be used on subaccounts
- Account admins can be provisioned into the separate subaccounts, which essentially gives those users access to a fully customizable LMS while the super-admin at the root level can easily affiliate content to selected subs and pull aggregated reports on usage and enrollments across the entire ecosystem
Some positives on subaccounts:
- They are completely autonomous
- SSO can be configured completely separate from the root account
- auto CSV can be configured separately
- Login UIDs don’t have to match the root account if using native Bridge for authorization
- They can have their own Account Admins who have full rights over the account while being partitioned off from seeing any data in the root account or other subs
- Data can be pulled in Analytics for the entirety of the subaccount
- Most learnables are easily shared down from root to sub
- We go over this more in detail here
Things to consider before choosing subaccounts:
- If you’ve purchased Perform, subaccounts will prevent visibility to the entire company hierarchy since the data for each subaccount is siloed
- If you have even a handful of users who would cross into more than one subaccount, it is likely that subaccounts won’t be the best option as it makes for a challenging user experience to login to multiple different URLs for different reasons
- It will also consume multiple licenses if users are needing to access multiple accounts since Bridge will see these users as separate individuals
- If Live Trainings are a big part of your content delivery strategy, Live Training shells can be affiliated from root to sub, but the sessions do not affiliate since the accounts are autonomous and it would not be possible to aggregate a master list of attendees
- One, the subaccounts are, by design, autonomous to protect user privacy so we don’t want to cross-contaminate data
- Two, since the unique identifier of a user exists only in one account, it would be very challenging to aggregate a list of those IDs across the multiple subs for one Live Training session
- Administrative work tends to increase with additional subaccounts as it requires replication of some efforts
- Our self-registration functionality for provisioning into Bridge can only deliver users into one account
If you want to keep your hierarchy more intact, opting for a single root instance can serve many good purposes. Plus, our smart group functionality allows for some of the similar desirable traits of subaccounts without the added administrative load.
Manager smart groups are automatically generated when manager UIDs are assigned to learners as the means of building out the organizational hierarchy in Bridge. We go into more detail about popular smart groups, and one of the key points is that the manager can author content and has selective permissions to enroll only their reporting line into content. They can also only pull reports on their reporting line, which keeps data protected across the organization.
Since managers can change quite often, depending on your industry, an added bonus to keeping users all in one account is that there is never a need to migrate historical data to another subaccount.
Bridge does not transfer user data across the accounts, so any necessary migration will require a bit of manual work to download the user’s transcript and upload that history into Bridge (matching up the appropriate user IDs and course IDs).
What we love about smart groups is that admins still have the authority to expose different categories and learnables to different users without having to duplicate efforts across multiple accounts.
We have some more best practices on how to automate content enrollments through smart groups, and we talk about using smart groups to expose the right content to the right users at the right time here.
What we love about subaccounts is that they give organizations the ability to fulfill both internal and external learner use cases. It is very likely that you will need internal compliance training and employee development; it is also very likely that you are working with contractors, partners, and customers who need knowledge on your product or service. Subaccounts are a great place to make that happen.
You can learn more about our external learner use cases.
Guide to Subaccounts Vs Smart Groups
