Firstly I am amazed that all of the Outlook calendar integration posts and ideas have disappeared from the community!
Secondly, for the 18 months that we have been a Docebo customer we have been told that Outlook integration is on the road map and is due for release. Each time being pushed back into the next quarter. Now we are told it is only possible if we purchase Docebo Connect!!?!?
The basic functionality of having a calendar appointment drop into a learners calendar automatically has been in every LMS I have worked with (even our legal eLearning content providers VERY basic platform that was only capable of hosting SCORM and classroom bookings).
We currently have a work around whereby the department admins are creating the ILT, enrolling all department users (whether they can go or not), then copying the link to the course and putting it into an Outlook appointment that will then drop into a lawyers calendar without them having to do anything. This way when a date/time/location changes we can manage the appointment manually. This is not sustainable and is something we shouldn’t have to do.
Has anyone else found a way of doing this?
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Hey @Neil Patterson
We recently migrated our Ideas Portal to the community, and we decided not to migrate ideas that had duplicates or were planned to be delivered already in our roadmap. There’s a possibility the previous Outlook ideas were lost in the move!
As for the decision to use Docebo Connect for this integration: we ultimately decided that it was important to our customers that we provide a flexible way to tailor the calendar workflows to their business needs, and this was only achievable through the Connect platform.
If you’d like to set up some time to share feedback on your needs for this integration template, please feel free to DM me!
Firstly I am amazed that all of the Outlook calendar integration posts and ideas have disappeared from the community!
Secondly, for the 18 months that we have been a Docebo customer we have been told that Outlook integration is on the road map and is due for release. Each time being pushed back into the next quarter. Now we are told it is only possible if we purchase Docebo Connect!!?!?
The basic functionality of having a calendar appointment drop into a learners calendar automatically has been in every LMS I have worked with (even our legal eLearning content providers VERY basic platform that was only capable of hosting SCORM and classroom bookings).
We currently have a work around whereby the department admins are creating the ILT, enrolling all department users (whether they can go or not), then copying the link to the course and putting it into an Outlook appointment that will then drop into a lawyers calendar without them having to do anything. This way when a date/time/location changes we can manage the appointment manually. This is not sustainable and is something we shouldn’t have to do.
Has anyone else found a way of doing this?
Curious if you are still doing this this way @Neil Patterson ?
have done some automated processes using api and webhooks before on this, but also have some thoughts on how to avoid enrolling everyone and inviting everyone (I.e. the join link is a predictable format and not user specific so you could build this and only send to those who are enrolled)
Curious if you are still doing this this way @Neil Patterson ?
have done some automated processes using api and webhooks before on this, but also have some thoughts on how to avoid enrolling everyone and inviting everyone (I.e. the join link is a predictable format and not user specific so you could build this and only send to those who are enrolled)
Hey @Bfarkas. Yes we are unfortunately. We have found that notifications are next to useless as they do not update the original appointment if something changes (room / time / date). This happens a lot in legal training, and then our lawyers waste time attending a session that has been moved as it is still in their calendar.
We don’t have the technical knowhow in our team to utilise APIs / webhooks etc (I know a few places have set up their own integration this way), and trying to get IT resource to help is like finding the illusive end of a rainbow - impossible!
We resigned ourselves to the fact that we will have to (begrudgingly) have to pay for something so simple to find out that it is only compatible with Office 365 which we are migrating to along with a whole host of other IT improvements, but these projects have been delayed until next year!
If you have any thoughts, or can offer any assistance in any way we would be eternally grateful. Feel free to DM me
I feel your pain. before the LMS we had an entirely manual outlook invitation system which meant painstakingly adding and removing people from the calendar invite - but it worked in way we want. With the introduction of Docebo we had to decide whether the saving in administrative time by not doing it manually was worth more than sending out invites that has content we cannot control and that could go out of date. e went with the latter, but id love to see more control and integration with outlook to mitigate the issues you highlighted.
I feel your pain. before the LMS we had an entirely manual outlook invitation system which meant painstakingly adding and removing people from the calendar invite - but it worked in way we want. With the introduction of Docebo we had to decide whether the saving in administrative time by not doing it manually was worth more than sending out invites that has content we cannot control and that could go out of date. e went with the latter, but id love to see more control and integration with outlook to mitigate the issues you highlighted.
You can have it, but you have to buy Docebo Connect for about £10k (I think they said it was like £5k to set up the connection and then £5k a year to run it?!) My original post was about why we can’t just have a basic integration as part of the platform like every other LMS provider
So with Office 365 I built out my own integration and then our national and those instructors who choose to use a scheduling tool (solves all the setting issues of learning to set up an iLT proper too) and then I tell it to not use the systems notifications, and then have it setup and add all those enrolled to the invite and use a native outlook invite from a donotreply box so that we can update them as well. Works fairly well.
Neil, without knowing the details of your exact scheduling, I was thinking more of like a series of bulk processes based on reports, where you can create the events in outlook, but use like weekly reports to bulk add the users who have registered for them. The link is always the same and creatable, so with the work of a few complex excel docs doing some calculations and concatenations could be possible to remove some of the manual effort.
Has anyone used the Docebo Connect with its Outlook 365 recipes? We are trying to improve upon the ILT calendaring experience and hoping that Docebo Connect can help resolve it for us.
We currently have it setup as POC in our sandbox portal with a SuperAdmin’s Outlook mail/calendar account, and have tested it; however, the ILT invites are still sending the ICS file and they are not being sent through Outlook 365 as a calendar event.
Hoping someone can help us.
Agree it’s a pain but it’s not a Docebo issue..it’s actually an Outlook desktop issue going back to 2012 from what I was able to research.
We will begin testing with Docebo Connect soon to see how well is bypasses this issue
Yup, you can have people manually use the file and get it onto the calendar of choice, but no one does it. I use a donotreply shared account as it’s calendar and use the account to schedule and send event invites for docebo instead. Only pain is keeping track of the calendar event ids so you can update them later on Docebo changes, but makes it a true outlook invite instead of ics based.
Hopefully Connect will solve this issue
Would love some connect access to experiment with.
Sadly they don’t do trials
Does it not work to use the export calendar feature in Docebo and then import/sync that into Outlook? It’s annoying, as every user has to do it individually, but they only have to do it 1 time and then they are set forever. That is the only workaround we have found. We have also noticed that when doing that, the calendar does not sync but every few hours, so if you make a change to an ILT or something in Docebo, that may not propagate out to people’s Outlook calendar for several hours.
Does it not work to use the export calendar feature in Docebo and then import/sync that into Outlook? It’s annoying, as every user has to do it individually, but they only have to do it 1 time and then they are set forever. That is the only workaround we have found. We have also noticed that when doing that, the calendar does not sync but every few hours, so if you make a change to an ILT or something in Docebo, that may not propagate out to people’s Outlook calendar for several hours.
Technically you are correct, at least from users I’ve run into, most don’t like having a separated calendar for thing sin Outlook, they want it on the ‘real calendar’ and so any kind of online calendar sync fails. End up building processes that create, send, and update standard calendar invites to get around it.
(I think they said it was like £5k to set up the connection and then £5k a year to run it?!) My original post was about why we can’t just have a basic integration as part of the platform like every other LMS provider