🛠️ 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?

When I’ve deployed this for organizations handling large user volumes or external audiences, keeping group memberships accurate is the single best way to ensure automated enrollment rules and catalog visibility don't break down over time.

For anyone looking to implement this, here is a quick breakdown of how to make it happen natively in under 5 minutes without needing any external API scripts or webhooks.

The 5-Minute Setup

1. Navigate to Groups: Go to the Admin Menu, select Groups under the Users section, and create a new Automatic Group (or edit an existing one).

2. Configure the Deactivation Safeguard: Under the group's Properties tab, scroll down to the Options section.

    

3. Check the Box: Select "Remove deactivated users from the group (only if added to the group by an automatic condition)".

    

4. Save Changes: Click Save Changes.

⚠️ Three Technical Gotchas to Keep in Mind

Before turning this on across all your groups, keep these platform constraints in mind:

• Manual Assignments are Immune: If a user was assigned to the automatic group manually (their assignment method shows as Manual in the user list), this setting will not remove them when they are deactivated. It only applies to users added via automatic conditions.

   

• Expiration vs. Deactivation: This option triggers strictly on account activation status. If an account hits its expiration date but its status remains set to "Activated", the user will stay in the group.

   

• Downstream Enrollments: If you are using this group to enroll users in courses or learning plans via automated enrollment rules, removing them from the group will not automatically unenroll them from those historical courses. They will lose visibility of the group's catalogs and menus immediately, but their completion or in-progress records remain intact unless an automation rule or API call explicitly modifies the enrollment.

For a full breakdown of how user account statuses interact with dynamic criteria, you can review the official guide: Managing groups – Docebo Help Center.

Happy 5th Anniversary, Docebo Community! 🎉

To celebrate, I’m sharing a quick 5-minute hack for anyone looking to launch or update the Gamification app and ensure your veteran learners get the recognition they deserve from day one.

The Challenge

The challenge was that we wanted to award milestone badges, which the Gamification app isn't exactly built to do easily when you have already implemented the system and have been using it a while because it doesn't retroactively award badges for milestones.

For example, the trigger "User completed a course" will count from account creation, but if you just created a "25 Courses Completed" badge, a user who already completed 30 courses prior to the badge's activation will never trigger it.

The 5-Minute Hack: Retroactive Milestone Badges

To prevent user confusion and avoid forcing your most active learners to start from zero, follow these steps to retroactively award milestone badges.

Step 1: Build Your Badge Hierarchy Within the Gamification App, create your milestone badges (e.g., 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, up to 1,000 courses). Give them engaging names and upload custom imagery. Assign the event trigger to User completed a course and set the required completion number for each.

Step 2: Run a Custom Report Navigate to Reports, create a New Custom Report, and pull the total number of completed courses per user since their account creation. Export this report to identify exactly which milestone tiers each learner has already passed. eLearning course AND ILT courses count towards completion. I believe it also counts a course more than once if the user’s enrollment was archived and they retook it. It does not count assets or learning plans for the course trigger.

Step 3: Retroactively Assign Badges Using your Custom Report data, navigate to the Badges management page and manually award the appropriate milestone badges to the respective users before officially launching your new gamification strategy. You can do this via CSV!

The Result

When your users log into their platform, they will immediately see all the milestone badges they’ve already earned in their profile. It’s a seamless workaround to boost immediate engagement and ensure past course completions are properly celebrated!

Our 5-minute hack may be obvious for many experienced LMS administrators but we had to learn it ourselves!

The My Activities page is filled with tabs that aren’t useful to us.We don’t use Social, Asset Ranks, etc. and it was cluttering the screen. We added this CSS code and voila, they are gone!

This includes all the tabs we currently hide. And it works for everyone on the platform!

/* Hide Classroom Tab in My Activities Page */
.myactivities-sidebar a.classrooms {display:none !important;}
/* Hide Badges Tab in My Activities Page */
/*.myactivities-sidebar a.badges {display:none !important;}*/
/* Hide Social Tab in My Activities Page */
.myactivities-sidebar a.social {display:none !important;}
/* Hide Q&A Tab in My Activities Page */
.myactivities-sidebar a.questionsAndAnswers {display:none !important;}
/* Hide Sharing Activity Tab in My Activities Page */
.myactivities-sidebar a.sharing-activity {display:none !important;}
/* Hide Asset Ranks Tab in My Activities Page */
.myactivities-sidebar a.assets-ranks {display:none !important;}

Another 5-minute fix: View access to OpenSesame courses WITHOUT Superadmin access!

We have the OpenSesame add-on, but as those with that add-on know, if you have a limited course package there’s no way to share the Docebo Content URL, to explore what courses are available, without giving someone Superadmin access.

So what do we do instead? We share the catalog that OpenSesame themselves host on their website!

Link to Catalog

This is just a catalog that they host on their site, and it’s nearly 1:1 with Docebo’s version. It allows 2 minute previews as well, which works for most cases. We ask people requesting training to browse this site to save us many hours of manual curation selection, and just give them guidelines.

For anyone looking for more help with this we have a guide on building milestone ladders you might find helpful. 

Love this call out for assigning badges retroactively using the CSV upload.

https://community.docebo.com/gamification%2D98/new%2Dguide%2Dbuilding%2Da%2Dmilestone%2Dladder%2Din%2Ddocebo%2D15849

I have numbered our notifications so that I can filter or reference them to other team members. I use the code and the end of that code is the given number. Previously from the address bar now similar to what is listed in the address bar. 

We have 5 different “portals” (one base account and 4 extended enterprise portals), so we developed a notification naming system that allows us to see who/what a notification is for at a glance.

Each portal has its own 4 letter code, so that we can organize the notifications by portal. The rough formula is as follows:

[4 letter company code]-[type of notification]-[subtype of notification]-[audience]

For example:

COMP-eLRN-CMPLT-M  

Company code-elearning-”learner completed a course”-Manager

COMP-LP-ENRL-U

Company code-learning plan-”User has been enrolled in a learning plan”-User

This also ensures that admins from each company only touch their own notifications.

A hidden gem in the Central Repository is Move to Folder. It makes it easy to put courses into specific or correct folders, especially when they were uploaded to the main folder.

A fast fix that helped us a lot:

Add consistent tags in the Central Repository for:

• language
• department
• compliance category

Example tags:
EN, Safety, Onboarding

Search became dramatically faster for admins and instructors.