🛠️ WEEK 2: The Power of the 5-Minute Fix

My organisation is a federation and we have our Member Organisations set up as branches in the system. To help keep things organised we follow one basic rule. Anything that requires a code must begin with the MOs informaiton.

MO-CA (for Canadian MO),  MO-ZA (for South Africa), and so on.  The users aren’t seeing the actual benefit as PUs because they only see their ‘stuff’, but as superadmins I know with a glance who the item belongs to.

Similarly as Jeanette mentions the use of code fields, we use them all over the functions to make it easier for the admins to understand & identify correct content or set ups. It’s a really powerful way to add specific acronyms or labels to identify the specifics.

We have 3 main user groups in the system, internal employees, partners & customers.
For each group we have same learning plans but with tweaked content in them and coding them with specific label, helps to identify the audience when the naming convention would be the same for all 3 learning plans.

Here is my favorite 5-minute fix: Exposing the internal Docebo User ID directly on the user profile using a User Additional Field and a simple Webhook.

While the internal User ID is readily available in Custom Reports, it isn’t exposed by default in the standard User Management UI. If you do frequent CSV updates, API troubleshooting, or manage complex HRIS syncs, navigating to a report just to grab a user's ID is a major time sink.

The Fix:

1. Create a new Text User Additional Field called "Internal User ID" (set it to be invisible to the end user so it doesn't clutter their view).

2. Set up a Webhook in Docebo triggering on the User Created event.

3. Catch that payload in your automation platform (Docebo Connect, Zapier, Make, etc.).

4. Use the user_id from the webhook payload to make a quick API call back to Docebo, updating that specific user's new additional field with their own ID.

In organizations I've worked with, the pattern that holds up best is automating this entirely so administrators never have to think about it. Once set up, the ID becomes immediately visible and searchable right from the primary Admin UI.

For the standard setup of custom fields, you can check the official documentation here: https://help.docebo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020125379-Creating-and-managing-user-additional-fields

If you want to grab the exact automation workflow, I’ve documented the full step-by-step recipe here: https://digitalstep.biz/recipes/webhook-update-user-docebo/

 
This is brilliant! Thanks for sharing!

We operate three extended enterprises Internal, Partner, and Customer that share centralized learning plans and pages while also delivering targeted content tailored to each audience.

Our platform supports fully automated New Hire and Annual Compliance training programs, which we highlight as a “5-minute automation hack.” By combining

1. User Additional Fields
2. Automatic Groups
3. Enrollment Rules
4. Notifications

we are able to set up end-to-end automation in minutes. This ensures users are automatically grouped, enrolled, and notified without manual intervention.

😀saving hundreds of administrative hours and significantly reducing operational overhead.

We also leverage HTML widgets with custom CSS to enhance and customize the user interface, improving the learner experience. The central repository is another highly valuable feature, allowing us to reuse content across multiple courses while tracking completions globally, ensuring consistency, scalability, and simplified content management.

Looking ahead, we plan to introduce gamification🔖to further drive learner engagement and interaction across our platform.

Overall, these capabilities have greatly improved efficiency, reduced administrative workload, and streamlined learning operations at scale allowing us to focus more on delivering value rather than managing processes.

I’m a big fan of a three-segment course code structure. I’ve used it when I was adminstering a Docebo site internally, and as a Docebo consultant, I recommend my clients do the same. Here’s what it looks like:

Structure: [Business Unit Abbreviation].[Business Unit Nomenclature].[Course ID]
Example: TAX.ONBOARDING.412

Here’s how I recommend standardizing it...

1. The Business Unit Abbreviation is pre-determined by the LMS Admin, though you can use other internal designations. For example, if Finance assigns a business unit identifier across the org, use what’s already known to everyone. The importance of having standardization here is that when your looking at course codes, you can quickly identify who “owns” content without having to click into course properties or categories to get that info. This is especially helpful when course authors use generic titles that could apply to multiple business units. What’s helpful here is that these abbreviations can be used elsewhere to name groups, branches, training material library folders, etc.
2. The business unit will inevitably say “I need a way to organize content in a way that’s meaningful to us.” Thats where the second segment comes in to play. The Business Unit Nomenclature is something the business determines with little governance from you. I do give them some practical advice (“keeping it succinct reduces the likelihood of typos”) but otherwise, I let them do what makes sense for them. I don’t need to understand how their brain works, though often I get a glimpse because they ask for my advice. More than anything, because they have total control over this segment of the code, they readily accept my ruthless insistence on the other two segments. I have to give a little to get a little.
3. The final segment is the Course ID that Docebo sequentially assigns to course shells as they are created. A caveat here is that this isn’t populated until after the shell is created, so when entering the course code, you have to leave this off at first and finish populating it once the shell is created. The reason I recommend use of this is because getting visibility into that number helps with things like the audit trail, CSV imports, etc. And because it’s a unique identifier, when you’re on the course management screen looking for a course with a known course code, you can just search by this segment of the course code rather than having to enter all three segments.

Granted, adoption of this is a learning curve. When I was internal, we migrated 600+ courses from our former LMS to Docebo. Course codes in the old LMS were the wild, wild west. There was ZERO consistency, so going this route took folks some getting used to. Fortunately, within a few months of implementation, they saw that and ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. The most common “offense” that I saw was that folks working quickly would forget to leave off the course ID segment because it needs to be added retroactively.

Even then, that’s a relatively easy thing to spot if you regularly run a data export of all courses and use AI to spot which codes don’t meet the criteria. And in the days before we were allowed to use AI, moving text-to-columns with a (.) as the delimiter made it easy to spot.

Curious if anyone else has course code governance hacks?