The first decision you’ll need to make is the architectural setup of your customers or partners. You have three options:

• Use your root account with smart groups
• Use a single sub-account with smart groups
• Use multiple sub-accounts

If you use Bridge internally, then you’ll need to choose between options two and three. We advise using a single sub-account if you are working directly with individual customers and partners. If you are working with businesses, we would still advise a single account if you don’t intend to enable Account Admins to manage the respective sub-accounts.

Using multiple sub-accounts will increase the administrative responsibilities, so we advise reading this article on the logistics of smart groups versus sub-accounts before moving forward.

You have three options for provisioning users for customers and partners:

• Manual - You can upload and delete users via CSV
• Auto CSV - If working with businesses who want to connect to a source of truth (i.e. HRIS) to add users to their respective sub-account in Bridge, the Bridge support team can help with this implementation
• Self-Registration Tool - We have a feature that allows for a user-facing form that will add users into Bridge

SIDE NOTE. If you are going to be using a single account for your customers and partners, Bridge can only handle a single form of authentication. If you are going to be leveraging multiple sub-accounts for businesses, Bridge support can also assist with setting up SSO in those accounts at your request.

Manual

The most common method of provisioning users for customer and partner training is manually as there is often not a single source of truth for users in Bridge considering the users are coming from multiple external methods.

If you are using smart groups in a single account, we recommend keeping a Google Sheet for added and terminated users. The new user file should have all of the appropriate custom fields needed for your grouping. At minimum, we advise:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• UID
• Business Name

In the above scenario, business name would be the only custom field in Bridge and would allow you the ability to silo content to that specific group.

There are no limits on custom fields. Other popular fields include location and job title.

You can download a sample user upload file from our resource library here.

A live document like Google Sheets can be leveraged with picklists for any fields that will be used for smart grouping (if you’re managing all customers or partners in a single account).

This alleviates the potential for human error to misspell something like the business name or state (which would impact user provisioning into the appropriate group which would then further impact enrollments for users who are supposed to belong to that group).

You can always add and remove fields in the future. When manually updating users via CSV, you can add a new or update an existing single custom field in addition to the UIDs without having any impact on the other fields.

SIDE NOTE. If at any point in time, you want to manually add a single user and you want to do it within the Bridge interface, adding the user’s email will populate both the UID and the email fields (sending the user a welcome email if notifications are turned on). Adding in any other character string will populate the UID field only.

For manual user provisioning, we advise keeping a second file for deleted users. The only value needed to terminate users is the UID, but you may want to copy and paste users from the live file onto the termination file for consistency.

If you are going to be creating multiple sub-accounts per partner or customer, we advise providing the businesses with a default file and emphasizing the importance of data integrity. Bridge user info is only as good as the info coming into it. If you are not going to provision an Account Admin to the sub-account, you can create a custom role for user management or you’ll want to devise an internal process for the businesses to alert you when learners are terminated (to ensure provisioned user data is accurate).

We have an article here on cleaning up your users.

Auto CSV

A flat file can be delivered to an SFTP for pickup by Bridge. 

When auto CSV is enabled, it will add any users on the file who are not yet provisioned into the account. It will terminate any users who are provisioned into the account and are not on the file upload. The Account Admin role has the ability to override a termination.

You can read more here about the technical needs for auto CSV.

Self-Registration Tool

We do have a custom tool for purchase that allows for you to support a self-service option for your learners. Users can fill out a form that will then place them into a single Bridge instance (the root account or a sub-account). You can brand it with your colors and logo as well as control the fields visible to your learners. Answer options are free text or picklist.

You can read more about the technical capabilities of the tool here.

SIDE NOTE. A self-registration page can only point to one account, so multiple tools would need to be purchased to be leveraged by multiple accounts. We believe it is the optimal solution when there is a single customer or partner training portal where smart groups are being leveraged to silo different business learners.

Once users are in the system, you can modify their roles as needed.

SIDE NOTE. The manager role cannot be assigned via the “modify roles” function. It will be assigned to any user whose UID is placed into the manager UID field upon upload or whose name is selected from the dropdown in the admin tools for user management (an ID that does not yet exist as a user in Bridge cannot be added as a manager).

The upload will require that an ID exist as a user. That ID should then be in the manager UID column that will be mapped upon upload. If you do not wish to have a manager hierarchy, you can click to “3. Add Other Data Fields” and bypass the manager mapping process.

You may want to use the manager role as the top of the hierarchy for the respective businesses in your customer or partner training portal. 

By leveraging the manager role, they will have limited visibility to users and will only see a single group called “My Learners” that is all of their direct and indirect reports. The manager role can only see content they’ve authored and can pull Analytics reports for only their direct and indirect reports.

It is possible to create a custom role with permission to see users and Analytics, but there is no way to limit visibility based on a custom field. This means that any user who is given permission for viewing users or Analytics or who is provisioned the role of Advanced Analytics Analyst will be able to see data for all users in the account. 

Using the manager role as the top of the business name is a workaround to that requirement as it does silo visibility in a unique way.

You can read more about setting up permissions for the manager role in Bridge here, including content visibility (learner relevance in Bridge) and notification options.

The learner user will see their Learning page, Journeys, and profile (if enabled).

Now you can create groups using the values from the custom fields of the users that you uploaded.

Groups can only be created off of values that exist for the users in the admin tools for user management. Groups cannot be created for future values. Adding a future value to a test user, creating the group, and then removing that value for a user in the system will keep the group with zero users affiliated to it. Adding that value to a user in the future would move that user into the smart group appropriately.

You can see here that we’ve started to create groups based on the business name, using the “Team” nomenclature to keep these together alphabetically.

Manual groups are also an option. These groups will not change users based on custom fields.

If you are going to be the primary manager of the account or accounts, then we would recommend using the root account whenever possible to create content. The only reason you'd want to use the sub-account directly is if you want the sub-account admins or authors to be able to edit the content as they please.

Provisioning Account Admins into the sub-account will give them the ability to edit content that was created directly in that account. Provisioning Authors and managers (with the permissions) will also give them the ability to edit content that was created directly in the account unless you enable the feature to limit content editing to owners (needs assistance to turn on from Bridge Support).

A course that is affiliated down to the sub will not have the ability to be edited by someone directly in the sub. Note that content that is created in the sub does filter up to the root for visibility. In the gray details under the title, you can see from where the content was created (this is also visible from the course_templates file in the data dump/Download All Data page, which you can learn more about here).

Content can be made visible to learners in four ways:

• Required
• Recommended
• Available in the Learning Library
• Through the Shareable Link

We have a thorough breakdown of content visibility options to learners in Bridge here. This includes the available notifications in Bridge and details on whether or not you want to enable the summary notification emails.

You’ll want to assess how you’re using this learner relevance coupled with categories and smart groups to organize and customize your users’ views.

We also have an article here on content management and provisioning best practices. If you’d like for the learners in the sub-account to see the Bridge-authored content with the root account branding and get certificates for the content as if the content was being taken directly in the root, then you’ll want to leave the toggle on (as the default) to maintain root account branding.

Our experience suggests that learners need incentives to come into Bridge as a customer or partner. Ask yourself these questions:

• Will they get a certification? 
• Continuing education credits? 
• A bump on their performance review that will impact their compensation? 
• Greater commissions due to better enablement?

You can set up reports in Analytics to send in cadence to internal or third-party personnel.

We have a list of popular KPIs for content distributors here (relevant to customer and partner training), and there is a video (below) on how to look up month-over-month usage to create pivot tables based on the custom fields of your choosing so you can see the most active users in your account and potentially build out leaderboards for increased accountability.

Finally, Bridge Advanced Video is popular to create a resource library in the Learning Library navigation or to build out a public portal.

Please reach out to support@bridgeapp.com for questions or to get connected to your Bridge Success Team member. We have different license packages available for customer and partner training should this be something that you’re exploring for your business.