Feature Overview and Requirements

The need to switch profiles will not affect many users in the LMS. It primarily impacts those who have multiple profiles at various organizations and possibly across several organizational levels. It is a more important skill to understand for portal administrators, lower level administrators, and managers. 

The primary way to identify a potential need to switch profiles can be answered by considering a couple of statements or questions:

• I know I have access to manage these users. Why can’t I find them or see them on pages like My Team?
• I know I have access to manage course set-up for the entire portal. Why can’t I change the settings for some courses? Why do some courses behave differently by organization?

Other things such as viewing how customizing organizations’ or position groups’ user experience through branding may require you to switch profiles or impersonate others who are affected by the customizations, but in those cases the need to do so is more obvious.

Step by Step Procedure and Field Description

How to Switch Profiles

Regardless of the reason you may need to switch profiles, the process is the same and easy to do.

1. From the LMS Header, click on your account to open a menu listing all your profiles. Depending on your setup, you may have just locations to choose from or you may have profiles listed at the Company, Business Unit, or Division level. Those will show with a drop-down arrow.
   
2. To switch profiles, you need to know which one to target the updates you want to make.
   • To pick a location already on your list, simply click on it or tap it. 
   • To pick a location from a higher level profile (shown below), click the drop-down arrow next to the organization (1). 
   • Click into the Enter Location field and either use type-ahead search to narrow down the results or scroll through the list. Select the location (2) to which you want to switch.
   • Once selected and populated in the field, click the Switch button (3).
     
3. The page will refresh and take you to the default home page of that organization. From there, navigate to the area you want to view or modify.

Switching Profiles to Update Course Settings by Business Unit

When setting up or editing a course, some of the fields you can configure are actually Business Unit (BU) specific. When adding a new course, all the organizations you add to it will take on the settings you establish when you save it, which may be different from the defaults. If you add new organizations at a later date, they may take on the default settings instead of the settings you made on the original list of organizations.

If you want to remove an entire Business Unit from a course, you may also find you cannot do so until you switch to a location in that Business Unit.

Fields that can be set differently by Business Unit include:

• Approval Required (System default = No)
• Subscription Program (System default = null)
• Non-Subscribers Can Enroll (Only available if assigned a subscription; System Default = No)
• Allow Use of Interest Lists: (System Default = Yes)

Example: A course is shared with Business Units “US” and “EMEA”.  If you are logged into your default profile location under Business Unit “US” and you want to change the remove the EMEA Business Unit from the course, you need to switch your current profile to a location in BU “EMEA” to do so. 

By switching to a profile in any location under the EMEA Business unit, you can return to the course organizations list and find the “X” to remove it from the list.

Switching Profiles to View People and Information in Other Organizations

If you work across several locations as a manager or administrator, depending on how your profiles are set up, you may have a situation in which you are can see the people under your primary profile location, but not others who report to you in a second or third location. If attempts to filter in My Team or other features does not yield the results you expect, you may need to switch profiles to another location view the users in question.