How are you using webhooks?

  • 24 May 2021
  • 4 replies
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SuperShaune
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Hey there Docebo Community!!!

One of my favorite product developments of the past couple of years is webhooks. There’s so much potential for clients to create their own “integrations”; we started with something like 20 triggers when we first released them a couple of years ago and we’re up to 61 different triggers today with more on the way.

I’ve seen some internal webhook demos where you can do things like populating a Google sheet with real-time information about enrollments or completions (which is super cool), sending a trigger to other  email notification systems, and even turning on a wifi-connected lamp when an event took place in Docebo with @riccardogalimberti.

I’ve been chatting with my fellow CXM, @Marina Vestita, about this and we’re curious to hear what other examples our Community can share with webhooks. Have you looked at some unique or interesting workflows and have some best practice that you can share?

In the meantime, if you’re interested in some more information, check out this Docebo U asset and the Knowledge Base here.

4 replies

Cindy McElhinney
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@SuperShaune Thanks for this post. So I wasn’t aware of webhooks and spent a bit of time looking at it yesterday. I viewed the slides in DU and I have the exact use case presented in the scenario. Right now our salesperson adds user information to a google sheet. Using Zapier it triggers a message to a channel in Slack. An internal person then adds the user to Docebo. They then manually update the spreadsheet with the new user’s expiration date and mark it as done in Slack. Clearly this is a use case for webhooks but I have a few very basic questions as I am not very techy:rolling_eyes:

  1. The KB article says only enterprise customers can use webhooks but as a Growth plan user I was able to install the app and it appears I can set up a webhook. Hope that’s not a bug:grin:, I’d like to keep using it!
  2. Can you explain a little better what I should enter for the Payload URL? This is a mystery to me. Can I do it through a GitHub account?:thinking:
Cindy McElhinney
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@SuperShaune

  1. Can you explain a little better what I should enter for the Payload URL? This is a mystery to me. Can I do it through a GitHub account?:thinking:

@SuperShaune So I’ve taken a closer look at this today and am now realizing that there is not a simple explanation to the Payload question as I asked it of you. :wink: Seeing now that I’d really have to go all in to understand how this all works. I mentioned that I am not technical, as in, I’m not a programmer but I am usually pretty good at figuring out technical things so not to say that I couldn’t get a grasp on this but I’ll have to evaluate whether the efficiency gains warrant me really taking a deep dive. I could envision several use cases for us so having the skills to utilize webhooks would be pretty cool. One in particular is keeping data fresh for a Google Data Studio dashboard which I have to update manually right now. So if I could find the bandwidth to learn this, it would probably save me time in the long run. Anyway, I’ll look forward to hearing from others how they are using webhooks to gain efficiencies and maybe someday in my next life I’ll be a web developer:laughing:

SuperShaune
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Hey @Cindy McElhinney 

Thanks for the follow-up as always!

Trust me when I say that I’m by not means a technical profile either; but a benefit of working with such a range of clients and colleagues is that I’ve been able to pick up a few things along the way and can ask them a million questions when I’m stuck. :)

For me, one of the coolest and easiest for me to understand from a technical and functional perspective would be the Google Sheets or Excel examples. I can see a lot of benefit to being able to collect basic information like course enrolment and completion and then finding a simple formula to show me - in real time - the completion percentage.

To your point, I can see that Zapier has an integration with Google Data Studio, so getting this information pushed directly there should be relatively straightforward.

The other example I’ve seen (again from another client) is looking at how they can leverage some of the transaction webhooks (for eCommerce) in order to automatically trigger another system to create and send out an invoice.

And, one other one that falls a bit outside of the LMS but that we still use in Docebo is linking a Google Form (which we use to make requests for certain things) to create a Jira task (pre-populated with some info) to then update a Google Sheet (for tracking purposes) to then sending an automatic email to the requestor and a few other people. (super super cool!)

 

Bfarkas
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I utilize several web hooks, some permanent and some temp to solve bugs while we work on larger fixes. The core in most of my setups is that I have it sent to Power Automate as part of our organizations Office365 suite, similar to Zapier mentioned above. This lets me take the payload and do basically anything I want with it.

Some simple ones are:

  • Update time zone of user when they change branches or are new to the system (Our branches are based on the office location of the user, so when they change, it is usually a physical location change as well. The web hook sends alerts of this change and then I have a flow in power automate that runs and checks what time zone this new branch should be in, and updates the user to be in the proper zone so that they don’t have time issues.
  • Monitor for new branches: Because our branches are based on locations, new offices open all the time and a branch is added that we don’t know about. This simply posts a message to our Microsoft teams site and emails a few other users to alert everyone on the team that a new one has been created.
  • Monitor enrollment to a course managed by an external vendor that has bugs now and again, so it lets us watch for these errors in real time and are notified if a user does not move to completion status when they should.
  • Classroom scheduled session Updates: This is a side process to a larger project I need to write up. We created a custom experience to allow instructors to quickly and easily schedule and enroll  ILT classroom sessions (Think of it as a scheduling wizard, here’s an overview video of the basics of it, there have been changes since this but you’ll get the general idea ). There are two webhooks that monitor for manual changes or deletions of sessions that were made with this tool, to keep the management of those sessions in sync.

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