Multi-Tenancy & Organizational Structure

Cohorts & User Groups

Acorn PLMS enables you to organize your users into cohorts, teams, departments, and organizational nodes to reflect your organization's structure. This hierarchical approach to user grouping ensures that team members access only the data and functionality relevant to their role and responsibilities.

Understanding Organizational Structure

What Are Cohorts and User Groups?

Cohorts represent logical groupings of learners within your organization. These can align with your company's departments, teams, business units, or any other organizational division. User groups work alongside cohorts to provide granular control over access, permissions, and reporting.

By organizing users into cohorts, you can: - Restrict access so that managers see only their team's information - Apply consistent policies across related groups - Generate cohort-specific reports and analytics - Manage enrollment and learning assignments at scale

Multi-Level Organization Support

Acorn supports grouping at multiple organizational levels, including: - Company level: Organization-wide rollups and aggregated data - Department level: Departmental divisions with isolated management - Team level: Smaller functional teams within departments - Business units: Custom organizational divisions as needed

Role-Based Access Control

Standard Role Types

Acorn provides a predefined set of 10 role types that cover most access control requirements. These roles define what actions users can perform and what data they can view. Each role can be scoped to specific cohorts, ensuring that users only access information relevant to their assigned group.

Roles can be assigned with varying levels of permissions, including: - User creation and management - Learner enrollment - Content management - Report generation and analytics access - Cohort administration

Partner and Multi-Tenant Access

If your organization works with external partners, role-based permissions ensure complete data isolation. Partner users can be provisioned with roles that restrict their access to only their assigned users, cohorts, and related data. Depending on permissions, partners may: - Create and manage their own users - Enroll learners from their organization - Manage content for their group - Run reports scoped to their cohort only

Partners have no visibility into other partners' data or your organization's internal information, maintaining complete confidentiality and security.

Custom Role Configuration

If your organization requires a specific permission model beyond the standard 10 role types, custom roles can be configured as part of a professional services engagement. Contact your Acorn implementation team to discuss custom role requirements.

Cohort Manager Capabilities

User Management

Cohort managers can create and manage users within their assigned cohort. There are no limits on the number of users a cohort manager can create, providing flexibility as your organization grows. From a licensing perspective, this is important to understand: user passes are only consumed when a user logs in, not when an account is created. This means you can provision additional inactive users without impacting licensing costs.

Analytics and Reporting Access

Cohort managers can be granted access to Supervisor Dashboards that are scoped to their assigned cohort. These dashboards provide visibility into: - Course completion rates - Compliance metrics - Learner-level performance data - Recent activity within the cohort

Supervisor dashboards are available through existing role configurations and do not require additional add-ons or premium licensing.

Dashboard Customization

Dashboards can be tailored per cohort to meet your organization's specific reporting needs. Customization options include: - Calendar widgets for upcoming events and deadlines - Recent activity feeds showing learner progress - Progress analytics and completion tracking - Custom filters to focus on specific teams or individuals

This flexibility ensures that each cohort manager sees the metrics most relevant to their responsibilities.

Enrollment Methods

Acorn supports multiple enrollment approaches to accommodate different organizational workflows:

Self-Service and Manager Enrollment

Employee Self Service: Learners can self-enroll in available courses and programs
Manager Enrollment: Managers can enroll employees directly from their dashboard
Mass Enrollment: Enroll entire teams, departments, or organizational units at once

These flexible enrollment methods allow you to implement the workflow that best suits your organization's structure and learning culture.

Capability Ratings by Organizational Level

Acorn's Capability tool can be configured to provide overall ratings at different organizational levels: - Company level: Organization-wide capability scores - Department level: Departmental performance metrics - Team level: Individual team capability assessments

This multi-level rating capability helps you understand skill development and competency across your entire organization.

Automated Reporting

Managers and administrators can generate automated reports focused on their assigned cohort. Reports can be: - Scheduled: Set to run at specified frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) - Filtered: Focused on specific teams or individual employees - Customized: Tailored to track metrics relevant to your organization

Automated reporting ensures that stakeholders receive timely insights into learning progress and compliance without manual intervention.

Best Practices for Organizing Cohorts

When setting up cohorts and user groups in Acorn:

Align with organizational structure: Map cohorts to your company's actual departments, teams, and reporting lines for easier management and clearer access control
Plan for growth: Create cohorts with room for expansion, but keep them focused enough to be meaningful for reporting and access control
Use consistent naming: Establish clear naming conventions for cohorts to reduce confusion and improve navigation
Configure appropriate roles: Assign the minimum permissions needed for each manager role to maintain security and data governance
Test access controls: Verify that users can see only the data intended for their cohort before rolling out broadly

Next Steps

To set up cohorts and user groups in your Acorn instance, work with your implementation team to: - Define your organizational hierarchy and cohort structure - Assign appropriate roles based on user responsibilities - Configure dashboard access for managers and supervisors - Test enrollment workflows and access controls

For additional support or custom configuration needs, contact your Acorn implementation partner.

Data Segregation Between Tenants Data Segregation Between Tenants

When your organisation operates multiple business units, departments, or partner relationships within Acorn PLMS, maintaining strict data isolation is critical to security, compliance, and operational integrity. Acorn's robust data segregation capabilities ensure that sensitive content, user information, and organisational data remain completely isolated between different tenants while operating on a shared platform infrastructure.

Understanding Data Segregation in Acorn

Data segregation in Acorn PLMS refers to the logical and technical separation of information belonging to different business units, operational divisions, or external partners. Rather than requiring separate system instances for each entity, Acorn enables you to maintain multiple tenants within a single platform while guaranteeing that data from one tenant cannot be accessed by, or interfere with, another.

This architecture provides significant advantages: you benefit from streamlined system administration, unified platform management, and reduced infrastructure costs, while your business units and partners maintain complete confidentiality of their respective data, content, and user information.

Key Segregation Capabilities

Content and Learning Material Isolation

Acorn ensures that course content, learning modules, assessments, and training materials created or uploaded by one business unit remain accessible only to that unit's authorised users. This is particularly important if your organisation has:

Competing business divisions that require confidential training materials
Regional or geographic business units with localised content requirements
Partner organisations accessing the platform for collaborative learning programs
Sensitive departmental training that must not be visible to other areas of the organisation

Each tenant's content library, course catalogues, and learning resources are independently managed and controlled, with no cross-contamination or unintended access.

User Information and Account Management

User profiles, authentication records, learning history, and performance data are strictly segregated by tenant. This means:

User accounts created within one business unit's tenant cannot access another tenant's system
Learner progress, assessment scores, and completion records remain confined to the originating tenant
User directories and administrative rosters are completely separate between tenants
Access controls and permission structures are independently configured per tenant

Your organisation maintains full visibility and control over which users belong to which tenant, preventing accidental data exposure or unauthorised access across business unit boundaries.

Operational Data Independence

All operational data—including configuration settings, reporting datasets, audit logs, and system preferences—is maintained separately for each tenant. This ensures that:

System administrators for one business unit cannot inadvertently modify settings affecting another tenant
Reporting and analytics reflect only that tenant's learners, courses, and performance metrics
Backup and recovery operations can be performed independently per tenant without affecting others
Compliance and audit trails remain isolated and verifiable for each distinct entity

Security and Compliance Benefits

Acorn's data segregation approach delivers multiple security advantages essential for regulated industries and multi-tenant environments:

Privacy Protection: By ensuring complete logical separation of tenant data, Acorn helps you comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific privacy requirements. Each business unit's information remains confidential and is not commingled with other organisational data.

Regulatory Compliance: Many compliance frameworks require documented data isolation between business units or customer accounts. Acorn's segregation capabilities support these requirements, with clear audit trails and separation mechanisms.

Risk Mitigation: If a security incident or data breach affects one tenant's environment, the impact remains localised. Other business units' data and operations are not compromised, reducing organisational risk exposure.

Partner Data Protection: When external partners or customers use Acorn for collaborative learning, data segregation ensures their proprietary information, learner data, and customised content remain strictly confidential and inaccessible to other platform tenants.

Organisational Clarity and Management

Beyond security considerations, data segregation provides important operational benefits:

Distinct organisational structures: Each business unit or operational umbrella maintains its own hierarchical structure, reporting relationships, and administrative teams
Independent reporting: Business unit leaders receive analytics and insights relevant only to their division, with no cross-tenant data mixing
Simplified administration: Administrators work within their tenant context, reducing confusion and administrative errors
Clear accountability: Performance metrics, training completion, and compliance reporting are transparently attributed to specific business units

Implementing Segregation Across Your Organisation

When configuring Acorn PLMS for multiple business units, ensure your system administrator:

Creates distinct tenant instances for each business unit or partner relationship requiring data isolation
Assigns administrators and users exclusively to their relevant tenant with appropriate role-based access controls
Configures content management workflows so that materials created in one tenant are not accessible to others
Establishes clear naming conventions and documentation to maintain transparency about which data belongs to which tenant
Implements audit logging to track data access and modifications within each tenant independently

Maintaining Data Integrity Long-Term

As your organisation grows and evolves, Acorn's data segregation capabilities continue to support your security and operational needs. Regular reviews of tenant configurations, user assignments, and access controls help ensure that data remains properly isolated. Should business units merge, reorganise, or external partners conclude their engagement, Acorn's administrative tools allow you to manage tenant data migrations or deletions with confidence that other tenants remain unaffected.

By leveraging Acorn's robust data segregation features, your organisation can confidently operate a centralised learning platform while maintaining the data privacy, security, and organisational integrity that your business units and partners require.

Hierarchical Org Structures Hierarchical Org Structures

Your organization's structure is fundamental to how Acorn PLMS manages learning, training assignments, and performance development. Acorn supports multi-tiered hierarchies that reflect departments, divisions, locations, and reporting relationships—enabling you to organize learning initiatives at any level of your business.

Understanding Organizational Hierarchies in Acorn

Hierarchical org structures in Acorn PLMS allow you to represent your organization's complexity accurately. Whether you manage a single location or a global enterprise with multiple divisions, departments, and sub-departments, Acorn can model your exact organizational framework.

This hierarchical approach enables you to:

Assign learning programs to specific departments or divisions
Track learner progress by organizational unit
Generate reports segmented by department, location, or hierarchy level
Apply role-based permissions tied to organizational position
Automate manager assignments based on reporting structure

Importing Organizational Structure Data

Rather than manually building your hierarchy within Acorn, you can automatically import your organizational structure directly from your Human Resources Information System (HRIS). This ensures your learning management system always reflects your current organizational reality.

Data You Can Import

Acorn accepts a comprehensive range of employee and organizational demographic information via HRIS integration, including:

Unique Identifiers: Employee IDs and any other unique reference numbers your HRIS system uses
Personal Information: Employee names and contact details such as email addresses
Organizational Details: Department names, division names, location information, and reporting hierarchies that define your org structure
Role Information: Job titles, role classifications, and functional areas
Employment Status: Active employee status, termed employees, secondment assignments, and other employment classifications
Custom Fields: Any additional data your HRIS wants to pass to Acorn for extended functionality

This data flows from your HRIS into Acorn, creating an accurate digital representation of your organization that drives learning management decisions throughout the platform.

Integration Methods

Acorn PLMS provides two primary methods for importing your organizational hierarchy and demographic data from your HRIS:

SFTP Integration

Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) allows you to schedule regular file transfers of your organizational data. Your HRIS system exports employee and organizational information to an SFTP location, and Acorn retrieves this data on a defined schedule. This method works well for organizations that prefer batch imports at specific intervals (daily, weekly, or monthly).

REST API Integration

For organizations requiring real-time synchronization, Acorn's REST API provides direct, programmatic access to import demographic and organizational data. API-based integration allows you to push updates whenever your HRIS system changes occur, ensuring Acorn remains synchronized with your current org structure at all times.

Both integration methods support the same comprehensive data sets, so your choice depends on your organization's synchronization needs and technical infrastructure.

Setting Up Organizational Hierarchy Imports

When implementing HRIS integration with Acorn PLMS, work with your Acorn implementation team to:

Define Data Mapping: Identify which fields in your HRIS correspond to the organizational structure elements Acorn requires
Establish Hierarchy Levels: Confirm how many levels your org structure contains (for example: Company > Division > Department > Team)
Select Integration Method: Choose between SFTP or REST API based on your synchronization requirements
Configure Update Frequency: For SFTP, set your import schedule; for API, establish your update cadence
Test the Integration: Verify that organizational data imports correctly and reflects your actual structure

Maintaining Data Accuracy

Once organizational hierarchy imports are active, Acorn PLMS maintains your structure based on the data provided by your HRIS. When employees change roles, transfer between departments, or their status changes (active to termed, or temporary secondment assignments), these changes should flow through your integration.

Regularly audit your organizational structure in Acorn to confirm it matches your HRIS source of truth. This ensures learning assignments, manager relationships, and reporting are always accurate.

Using Your Hierarchy for Learning Management

With your organizational hierarchy established in Acorn PLMS, you can leverage it across the platform:

Program Assignment: Target learning programs to specific departments, divisions, or locations
Manager Assignment: Automatically assign managers as course approvers or learning overseers based on org structure
Reporting and Analytics: Segment performance data by organizational unit to identify training needs by department
Compliance Management: Apply mandatory training requirements by division or location
Career Development: Use hierarchy information to recommend role-based development paths

Next Steps

If your organization has not yet connected HRIS integration to import organizational structure data, contact your Acorn support team to begin setup. Providing Acorn with an accurate, current organizational hierarchy from day one ensures your learning management system delivers maximum value across all organizational levels.

Multi-Domain & Portal Management Multi-Domain & Portal Management

Acorn PLMS enables your organization to manage multiple branded portals and domains within a single platform instance. This capability is essential for organizations serving diverse audiences—such as employees, partners, customers, or regional markets—each requiring a distinct branded experience while maintaining unified backend management and reporting.

Understanding Multi-Domain Portal Architecture

When you operate multiple branded portals, each domain can present a customized interface, branding, and user experience while drawing from the same core learning management system. This approach allows you to:

Maintain separate branded environments for different business units or customer segments
Control access and content visibility per domain or audience type
Consolidate administrative oversight and reporting across all portals
Reduce infrastructure complexity by avoiding multiple isolated platform instances

Your organization's portal structure is defined within the multi-tenancy framework, where each tenant (domain or portal) can have its own configuration, user roles, content libraries, and learner groups.

Configuring Separate Portals and Domains

Each portal or domain you create operates as a logical separation within your Acorn PLMS environment. During setup, you define:

Domain Mapping: Associate each branded domain (for example, learning.company.com, partner-training.company.com, or regional-academy.company.com) with its corresponding portal configuration in Acorn.

Branding and Customization: Configure logo, color schemes, header/footer content, and custom CSS for each portal to reflect your audience's brand identity. This ensures that employees, partners, and customers each see a portal that aligns with their organizational or market context.

User Access and Permissions: Define which user groups, roles, and learners have access to each portal. Your organization can restrict content, courses, and administrative functions by domain, ensuring that internal employee training remains separate from external partner or customer training portals.

Content and Course Libraries: While your organization may maintain shared content repositories, you can control which courses and learning materials are visible on each portal. This allows you to deliver role-specific or audience-specific content through different branded interfaces.

Managing Users and Access Across Multiple Portals

Your organization can assign users to multiple portals simultaneously, or restrict them to specific domains based on their role and learning needs. User profiles and progress can be configured to be portal-specific or consolidated across domains, depending on your reporting requirements.

When managing users across multiple portals:

Use role-based access control (RBAC) to determine which administrators can manage which portal
Create separate learner groups or cohorts per portal to organize audiences by domain
Configure single sign-on (SSO) integration per portal if needed, or use a unified authentication system across all domains
Monitor user engagement and completion metrics per portal through dedicated reporting dashboards

Organizational Structure and Portal Hierarchy

Your Acorn PLMS instance supports a hierarchical organizational structure where portals can be organized by business unit, geography, customer segment, or any other meaningful division. This hierarchy determines:

Content inheritance and availability rules
Reporting aggregation and drill-down capabilities
Administrative delegation and approval workflows
Learner group management and enrollment processes

Within this structure, you maintain a clear separation of concerns: administrators responsible for one portal have appropriate permissions scoped to that domain, while system administrators retain oversight of the entire multi-portal environment.

Support and Maintenance Across Multiple Portals

Managing multiple portals requires coordinated support and monitoring. Your organization should establish clear processes for:

Incident Reporting: When issues arise on any portal, clients and administrators can log and track support requests by contacting the dedicated Acorn support team via email at support@acorn.works. This ensures efficient handling and resolution of all inquiries, regardless of which portal is affected.

Portal Health Monitoring: Regularly review uptime, performance metrics, and user engagement across all portals to identify issues before they impact learners.

Content Synchronization: If your organization shares content across portals, establish version control and update workflows to keep material current and consistent.

Compliance and Reporting: Maintain audit trails and compliance records for each portal separately, especially if they serve different regulatory environments or customer contracts.

Best Practices for Multi-Portal Management

To optimize your use of multi-domain and portal management capabilities:

Plan Your Portal Structure Early: Define your audience segments, branding requirements, and access control needs before configuring portals. This prevents costly restructuring later.
Use Consistent Naming Conventions: Apply clear naming standards for domains, portals, user groups, and content libraries so your organization can scale without confusion.
Document Portal-Specific Configurations: Maintain a record of each portal's branding, access rules, and content assignments. This is invaluable for onboarding administrators and troubleshooting issues.
Leverage Reporting Dashboards: Use portal-specific and cross-portal reporting to understand learner behavior, identify bottlenecks, and measure learning impact across your entire audience ecosystem.
Test Portal Changes in Non-Production Environments: Before deploying branding or access control changes to live portals, validate them in a staging environment to prevent disruption to your learners.
Establish Clear Support Escalation Paths: Since multiple portals exist within one platform, ensure your support team knows how to route and prioritize issues across domains.

Scaling Your Multi-Portal Environment

As your organization grows, you may add new portals, retire others, or restructure existing domains. Acorn PLMS supports this flexibility without requiring platform re-implementation. Work with your Acorn team to plan portal expansions and ensure that new domains inherit appropriate configurations, content access rules, and user management policies from your established portals.

By leveraging Acorn PLMS multi-domain and portal management capabilities, your organization can deliver personalized, branded learning experiences to diverse audiences while maintaining centralized administrative control and unified reporting across your entire learning ecosystem.

Tenant Configuration & Duplication Tenant Configuration & Duplication

Understanding Acorn's Multi-Tenant Architecture

Acorn PLMS is built on a robust multi-tenant platform that allows you to deploy multiple independent environments under a single parent deployment. This architecture supports your organization's need for distinct portals, customized experiences, and isolated data while maintaining centralized administrative control.

Each tenant operates as a separate, fully configurable environment. You can think of tenants as independent organizational units—whether they represent different departments, partner organizations, regions, or client groups. The platform supports deployments at scale, with proven implementations handling 40+ tenancies and tens of thousands of users simultaneously.

Creating and Managing Tenants

Adding New Tenants

As an Acorn Administrator, you have full control over tenant lifecycle management. You can create, edit, and delete tenants directly within the platform without requiring code modifications. Each tenant you create becomes a fully independent environment capable of supporting its own users, courses, configurations, and branding.

When you create a new tenant, you establish the foundation for that environment's entire learning experience. This includes user management, content libraries, reporting structures, and administrative permissions.

Tenant Structure and Organization

Each tenant contains cohorts, which provide an additional layer of user segmentation and customization. This hierarchical structure allows you to organize learners into groups within a tenant based on departments, skill levels, training requirements, or other criteria relevant to your organization.

The combination of tenants and cohorts creates a flexible framework for managing complex organizational structures. You might use tenants to separate partner organizations or regional offices, while using cohorts within each tenant to segment learner populations further.

Replication and Configuration Approaches

When to Replicate vs. Configure

While full tenancy replication is typically not required in Acorn, you have flexibility in how you scale your environments. Rather than duplicating entire tenancies, the platform is designed for centralized tenant management where you configure multiple tenancies through a unified administrative interface.

What you commonly replicate in practice are cohorts, dashboards, and specific configuration elements rather than entire tenancies. This approach gives you efficiency in scaling while maintaining administrative control.

Tenant-Specific Configurations

Each tenant can be configured independently with its own:

Registration protocols and authentication methods – including dedicated Single Sign-On (SSO) connections
Custom URLs – allowing tenants to maintain distinct web addresses
API connections – enabling tenant-specific integrations with third-party systems
Branding and visual identity – through comprehensive white-labeling capabilities
Language settings – configured at the cohort level and adjusted by individual learners
User permissions and roles – including tenant-specific administrators and reporting officers

White-Labeling at Multiple Levels

Acorn supports white-labeling at both the tenant and cohort levels, enabling you to create completely branded experiences for different audiences. Your organization can configure distinct visual identities, branding elements, and learner interfaces across different partner organizations, regions, or audience segments while maintaining centralized oversight and reporting.

This capability is particularly valuable when managing multiple external partners or internal business units. Each environment reflects its own brand identity, creating a professional and customized experience for learners without requiring separate platform deployments.

Managing Tenant-Level Language and Localization

You are not restricted to a single language at the tenant level. Acorn supports flexible language management through multiple approaches:

Cohort-level language settings – administrators can specify default languages for specific cohorts
Learner-controlled preferences – individual learners can select their preferred interface language
Automatic language detection – Acorn implements predictable language detection based on each learner's browser settings, automatically surfacing the interface in their native language where available

This multi-layered approach ensures that your diverse learner populations access content and interface elements in their preferred languages without administrative intervention for each user.

Tenant-Level Reporting and Analytics

Reporting Scope and Access

Dashboards in Acorn are scoped at the tenant level, meaning each tenant maintains its own reporting environment. Platform administrators can run reports across multiple tenancies to gain organization-wide insights, but there is no single combined master dashboard spanning all tenancies. Dashboards cannot be merged across tenancy boundaries.

This design ensures data isolation and appropriate access control—each tenant's administrators and reporting officers see only data relevant to their environment.

Partner-Level Completion Tracking

Tenant-based administration and reporting roles enable partner-level completion tracking. You can designate Tenant Administrators and Reporting Officers for each tenant, granting them access to completion data, engagement metrics, and compliance reports limited to their assigned tenant or user subsets. This ensures partners have visibility into their own learner data without accessing broader system information.

Comprehensive Reporting Capabilities

Acorn provides 19 distinct report types covering all aspects of the learning process. Administrators can leverage robust reporting tools to track completions, overdue training, capability gaps, and learner engagement. Reports can be:

Saved as presets for quick access to frequently needed views
Scheduled to run automatically on specific dates or recurring schedules
Dispatched to multiple recipients including Tenant Administrators and Reporting Officers
Exported as CSV or viewed in multiple graphical formats (bar charts, line charts, stacked bar charts, pie charts, and more)
Accessed via open API to integrate with external reporting databases, data warehouses, or third-party reporting tools

Data Security and Tenant Isolation

Acorn is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with strict application and service access controls ensuring the logical separation of tenancies. Web and database servers are functionally separated by service architecture and AWS resource boundaries, preventing data leakage between tenancies. The platform maintains ISO 27001 certification and full GDPR compliance, providing enterprise-grade security across all tenant environments.

Best Practices for Tenant Configuration

When configuring your tenant environments, consider centralizing administrative oversight while allowing tenant-level autonomy where appropriate. Use Tenant Administrators and Reporting Officers to delegate tenant-specific management responsibilities. Leverage white-labeling to reinforce organizational or partner identity. Plan your tenant and cohort structure to balance administrative efficiency with user segmentation needs.

By structuring your tenants strategically and using Acorn's configuration capabilities effectively, you can support complex organizational requirements while maintaining data security, reporting clarity, and scalable operations.