Implement Your Company's Brand and Add Users

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Understand how to set up your company’s enablement site.
Explain how an authentication provider gives users access to your enablement site.
Learn how you can make your enablement site accessible to external users outside of your company.
Identify the options for configuring your company’s brand details on your enablement site.

Brand Identity on an Enablement Site

Your company’s enablement site exists on a separate subdomain of trailhead.com. The enablement site connects to your Salesforce org for users, permissions, and content collections that your admins define in your Salesforce org.

Your enablement site is entirely yours, so an admin can customize your site to extend your brand identity. Only your authenticated users can access and publish content on your enablement site, and you have some options for determining who your users are and how they log in.

Let’s check in with our friends at Pure Aloe to see how they can implement these customizations.

Create Your Company’s Subdomain

Your subdomain is used in the URL where learners access your published trails and modules and where your authorized users log in to the Trailmaker apps. A subdomain URL looks like this:

http://<subdomain>.my.trailhead.com

Here’s how an admin can set up the subdomain.

Go to https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/subdomain and log in with your Salesforce username and password. To access this URL, your user needs the Manage Site Settings permission.
For Subdomain, enter the subdomain name that you want to use. This value is visible to all enablement site users because the subdomain appears in the URL that they use to access the site. Keep in mind that you can’t change your subdomain after you create it.
For Content Collection, enter the name of your company’s initial group of content that you want to make available to certain learners. You can manage and create more content collections later in your Salesforce org.
Click Done, and then confirm your choices in the next window.

Pure Aloe chooses the subdomain name purealoe, and names its initial content collection All Employees, which it plans to use for content that all Pure Aloe employees can access.

Content collections can help you implement your company’s enablement strategy for different groups of users. To learn more about setting up content collections, check out the next unit in this module.

After your subdomain is created, click Next.

Next, configure which authentication provider service your subdomain uses.

Plan for Your Audience

Learning content is typically meant to enable either or both of these audiences.

Internal learners, such as your company’s employees and contractors.
External learners, such as your company’s customers and partners.

The authentication provider that you select affects how your learners access your content. Take the time to evaluate your authentication provider options with all your content stakeholders.

Compare Authentication Providers

You have two options for the service that you use for authenticating users.

Salesforce Identity for Enablement
Trailblazer

Salesforce Identity for Enablement

We recommend that all new enablement sites choose Salesforce Identity for Enablement, which uses the Salesforce Identity access management service with an enablement site as a connected app. Why?

The identity provider can be your Salesforce org, which enables access for internal users, or an Experience Cloud site, which enables access for external users.
New users can easily access your enablement site with one click. They don’t have to complete a separate registration or create a separate Trailhead profile.
A link to your content just works, and admins don’t have to spend extra time generating links that handle authentication.
Admins create a Salesforce-connected app that handles authentication to your enablement site, and admins can specify other security measures, such as session timeouts and IP restrictions.

Here are some considerations to evaluate with Salesforce Identity for Enablement before you make your decision.

A learner doesn’t have a profile where they can see their badges and points within the enablement site. A learner can separately set up a Trailhead account, but that profile shows only badges and points earned from Trailhead content, not from enablement site content. You can also ask an admin to show badges on your Salesforce user profile.
To make your enablement site available both internally to Salesforce org users and externally to Experience Cloud site members, your internal Salesforce users must also be members of the Experience Cloud site. With Salesforce Identity for Enablement, we recommend that your enablement site serves either only internal Salesforce org users or only external Experience Cloud site members.

Trailblazer

A Trailblazer account provides an authentication method that’s used for a variety of Salesforce products and services. Here’s what you get with Trailblazer account for your enablement site.

A learner has a profile, where they can see their badges and points earned from both your private enablement site and public Trailhead.
You can make your enablement site available both internally to Salesforce org users and externally to Experience Cloud site members.

But your Trailblazer profile has fewer customization options compared to Salesforce Identity for Enablement.

A new user has extra steps for accessing your enablement site for the first time: They have to register on your enablement site and create a profile.
To help learners access content with fewer clicks, admins have to build single sign-on (SSO) URLs that incorporate authentication parameters.
Admins can’t define any extra security measures for user login sessions.

For a more detailed comparison of each authentication provider, check out the Salesforce Help topic, Considerations for Selecting an Authentication Provider.

Select Your Authentication Provider

After you create your subdomain, select the authentication provider that your company wants to use.

The next steps depend on which provider you selected. For Salesforce Identity for Enablement, after you click Use Salesforce Identity for Enablement, you’re prompted to create a connected app in your Salesforce org. You need three important pieces of information to complete the setup.

Your enablement site’s login page URL
Your connected app’s consumer key
Your connected app’s consumer secret

For the full details of this process, check out the Salesforce Help topic, Configure Salesforce Identity for Enablement.

To use your Trailblazer account, after you click Use Trailblazer, your authentication provider is selected, and no extra steps are necessary.

Pure Aloe wants to stay in line with the recommended workflow. Joseph selects Salesforce Identity for Enablement as the Pure Aloe authentication provider. Joseph then heads over to the help documentation to learn about how to set up a connected app and then activate Salesforce Identity for Enablement with his connected app credentials.

Make Your Content Available to External Users

Remember, your enablement site is private: Only authenticated users can log in and access your content or the Trailmaker apps. This works differently than Trailhead, where anyone in the world can create an account and start learning. When companies create private enablement site content for their employees, they often think about other important audiences: customers, partners, and other external users.

You can make your company’s content available externally by giving access to members of an Experience Cloud site. Site members are typically users who have roles that are external to your company. Here’s what’s required for an Experience Cloud site member to access your enablement site.

A site member must be assigned to a permission set that uses the Enablement Sites (myTrailhead) license and enables access to at least one content collection.
Your enablement site’s login URL must be accessible by a site member.

With Salesforce Identity for Enablement, you can use your Experience Cloud site’s login URL as the authentication login page URL. But doing so restricts the users who can log in to your enablement site to only Experience Cloud site members.

Set Up Your Company’s Brand Settings

The final consideration for branding your company’s enablement site is completing the available customizable options: logo, color, banner image, custom links, and content filters.

To configure these details, a user with the Manage Site Settings permission can access the Trailmaker Settings app.

Log in to your enablement site.
Click your user’s avatar in the upper right, and select Trailmaker.
Click the Settings tab.

Filters

Content creators tag each trail and module with metadata, which includes filters that help learners find the right content according to their role in your company, their experience level, or products that they want to learn about. In Trailmaker Settings, you can customize the available filter values that your company can apply to its content. An admin relies on input from content creators to define the custom filter values that you want to implement.

Branding

You can add your brand’s visual identity in these ways.

Add your brand’s logo.
Select your brand’s primary color.
Select a banner image that appears on the Today page.

Navigation

You can add these custom navigation elements.

Specify a URL for your company’s help site.
Specify a URL where your users navigate to after they log out from your enablement site.
Specify URLs that appear in the footer of your enablement site’s pages.

Content Exports

Eventually, after your company has published some content, you can quickly export all your published content so you can back it up in another system or repository. This option lets you preserve all the hard work that went into developing your company’s enablement site.

Badge Ratings

Learners can rate published modules they complete on a five-star scale. From Trailmaker Settings, you can review the average ratings that your company receives for each published module.

Next Steps

Wow! Joseph has been a busy admin, but his work isn’t done yet. Next, there’s another important workflow: giving learners access to the right content.