Hi Shannon,

I hate to be a “negative Nancy” about this one and I sincerely hope that you don’t run into the same issues as we have, but we’ve been trying to get the Salesforce app to work since December and have had very little luck.

First off, the integration/setup wasn’t that difficult.  We followed all of the instructions provided by Docebo.  We have been able to sync all of our users and contacts with no issue.  These are set to sync on an hourly basis and they continue to work without issues.

Everything else has been a nightmare.  We have the courses and learning plans syncing in real time.  The Enrollments syncing is set to “real time” which basically means every 15 minutes.  Here are the problems:

There’s no such thing as syncing certification data.  It doesn’t exist.  Only courses and Learning Plans.  So, as long as your certifications are based on the completion of a learning plan, you’ll just be using the learning plan data in Salesforce to report your certifications.  In my mind (and in the minds of nearly everyone in our organization), this is a MAJOR oversight in the Salesforce app.  Why not sync certification data?  We have been told by Docebo that if we want certification data in Salesforce, we can pay Docebo’s professional services extra to build an API that transfers it.    Additionally, adding certification data to the app is not a feature currently on the roadmap for further development on the app.

Furthermore, reporting on learning plan completion data would be a decent workaround for us, except for the fact that the Learning Plan data is INACCURATE!  We can pull a Learning Plan Enrollment report from Docebo and then pull a Learning Plan Enrollment report from Salesforce and then compare the two and see massive discrepancies.  This has been going on since December.  Docebo has released several new versions of the Salesforce app that was supposed to fix this, but we have not seen any improvement.  We’ve tried uninstalling the app completely and reinstalling it (which forced us to have to recreate any Salesforce dashboards we created around the data).  We’ve tried manually syncing data month by month. We’ve tried everything we know to try and, still, we can’t get accurate data from Docebo to Salesforce.  We’re literally working with Docebo’s tech support on a daily basis trying to get this fixed to no avail.

I really do hope you have much better luck with it than we have.  It looks like your post was 19 days ago, so if you have any lessons learned or feedback from your implementation of the app, I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts.

@Chet - thank you for sharing your experience! I work with Shannon and we are still in the process of installing and configuring the app. Good to know about the learning plan data - please do keep us posted on your progress or successes and we’ll do the same! 

@Chet, thank you so much for the info. I’m disappointed to hear about your experience and appreciate the heads up about things to be aware of as we go into our implementation. We also use completion of Learning Plans as our certifications for a number of reasons. I agree that it’s a major oversight that those aren’t included. We knew that going in but assumed the reporting would be accurate. A big driver behind our purchase of the app was to create better visibility for our sales teams into their partner’s certifications. Our current reporting is inaccurate and complicated because when we add content to an LP after a learner has completed it, the learner still shows as certified but their progress indicates less than 100% because they haven’t taken the new material. It’s a problem and is very time-consuming to use two different reports to figure out who’s certified. As Dan said, we’ll let you know how it goes.

very long post alert. TL;DR – test your data early and often, there’s lots of great documentation, make friends with your Salesforce admin

Hey @shanmcgin and @danwinter,

At my previous organization, I was among some of the first Docebo customers to adopt the beta release of the V3 SF integration back in 2019. In the early days of our integration, I experienced some of the same frustrations and struggles that @Chet pointed out in his post as it relates to Learning Plan completion reporting (Chet, I see that you’re right outside of Wilmington, NC – we may need to grab beers and share a few SF integration stories soon ). Below are my thoughts on Chet’s comments with a few tips sprinkled in, followed by a few tips from someone (me) who was able to wrestle the SF integration into submission to work for us.

Integration/Setup ease of use – as Chet shared, the initial setup is super straightforward and in my mind, the UI for the integration on the Docebo side is very user-friendly. You can run syncs, configure notifications, pull logs, update field mappings, and change a number of integration settings directly from the UI.

User/Contact Sync – as Chet shared, this typically runs without a hitch. At my previous organization, we were syncing SFDC Users to Docebo Users. This worked swimmingly for us as we were also able to use SAML to provision users directly into Docebo and sync all of their information from SF into Docebo as additional fields. This, in my mind, is one of the strongest aspects of the entire SF integration.

Certification Data – indeed information from the Certifications & Retraining app does not sync from Docebo to Salesforce. The native integration is limited to syncing information for Users, Courses, Learning Plans, and Sessions. This Salesforce V3 Data Model knowledge article is really helpful when it comes to understanding what syncs from Docebo to Salesforce and how it’s all related.

At my previous organization, we used the same approach you seem to be using, where we reported on Learning Plan completion in SF as a part of our certification tracking. Interestingly enough, we facilitated our certification exams through Kryterion Webassessor, a 3rd party exam hosting and proctoring solution. The score information for our exams synced back to Salesforce to a separate custom object that we then synced back to Docebo to the External Training app. It’s enough to make your head spin, but our Salesforce and IT teams were awesome and made all of our dreams come true via API.

Depending on your use case and the resources at your disposal, you could explore building a separate integration between any app in Docebo (like Certifications and Retraining) and a custom object in Salesforce. I’d advise on building these custom integrations sparingly as they can sometimes bring more work than value.

Learning Plan Data Accuracy – I feel Chet’s pain on this one. It took us months and months to clean up our data and understand where things were going wrong after we initially set up the integration. We too had issues with Learning Plan reporting accuracy when we first launched. At the end of the day, it’s really difficult to get clean Salesforce data, and this can often lead to inconsistencies in integrations like these.

If you plan to sync Learning Plans, I recommend starting with a small subset of Docebo data like a specific window of time – a day or a week – of enrollments for a single learning plan. Then compare the information sent to Salesforce line by line with the information you have in Docebo. Don’t just look at reports for Learning Plan enrollments, but rather look at all of the custom objects related to Learning Plans in Salesforce:

• Learning Plans (docebo_v3__LearningPlan__c)
• Learning Plan Courses (docebo_v3__LearningPlanCourse__c)
• Learning Plan Course Enrollments (docebo_v3__LearningPlanCourseEnrollment__c)
• Learning Plan Enrollments (docebo_v3__LearningPlanEnrollment__c)

Basically,

• Learning Plan Courses connect Learning Plans to Courses,
• Learning Plan Course Enrollments connect Learning Plan Enrollments to Course Enrollments,
• and Learning Plan Enrollments/Course Enrollments connect Learning Plans/Courses to Docebo Users.

Understanding those connections can really help you understand where to look for missing information. Identifying that something’s missing in any one of those objects can significantly help you and Docebo’s support team get to the bottom of the issue (if there is one).

I share all of this information hoping that it can help you and others who might discover this thread. As long as you test the data you plan to sync in small chunks, you should be in good shape. @Chet hang in there! I hope you can resolve the discrepancies you’re seeing in the learning plan data.

@shanmcgin and @danwinter, I’ll leave you with a few other thoughts as you work through the implementation:

Tips:​​​​​

• Use Roll-Up Summary Fields on your Salesforce Contacts/Users and Accounts to quickly and easily report on Course and LP enrollment data directly from individual records in Salesforce.
• Build a report using the Name, Description, and Slug for Courses and Learning Plans to build a nice “Course/LP menu” in Salesforce that allows your users to see all of the courses available in Docebo and grab the links from one easy place. You can also create multiple reports with different filters for different users in Salesforce if needed. 
• There is a lot of really helpful documentation for the Salesforce integration in the knowledge base (15 articles, to be exact). Use this to your advantage as you configure and troubleshoot the integration!

Advice:

• Check your sync logs daily and take advantage of the integration notifications in Docebo. It’s helpful to identify errors as soon as they happen so that you can easily troubleshoot and get ahead of potential problems quickly!
• Avoid the embedded Docebo experience in Salesforce if you can. The embedded experience is well-built, but it caters to a pretty specific internal use case and as such can sometimes lead to limitations. If you can build your use case without using the embedded experience, I would strongly recommend it. You can still take advantage of the data integration and user provisioning via SSO, and can still link out to all courses directly from within Salesforce without using the embedded experience!
• Your Salesforce admin and any Salesforce developers at your organization will be your best friends. They should be able to make all your dreams come true!

Thank you, @Adam Ballhaussen, for the detail and tips! This will be a huge help. Much appreciated.

@Chet have you had any better experiences with learning plan data syncing? We were considering using them, but accuracy of data is of utmost importance to us, and we’re already having issues with enrollment data syncing with just courses and catalogs. I’m interested to hear any updates you might have! 

Thanks so much, 

Patty

Does anyone have a Salesforce partner that you are satisfied with that you used for extended integration of the Salesforce Managed Package?

• Avoid the embedded Docebo experience in Salesforce if you can. The embedded experience is well-built, but it caters to a pretty specific internal use case and as such can sometimes lead to limitations. If you can build your use case without using the embedded experience, I would strongly recommend it. You can still take advantage of the data integration and user provisioning via SSO, and can still link out to all courses directly from within Salesforce without using the embedded experience!

@Adam Ballhaussen  I couldn’t agree more. I acquired the platform already embedded and am trying to research other options. All I can find are instructions or information on how to embed. Do you know what I can search or where I can find information or Knowledge articles on what my other option would be and how to go about it?

@Courtney.harvey great question. The main thing you’ll need to consider if you’re looking to move away from the embedded experience is user provisioning. You’ll want to use some form of  Single-Sign On (SSO). That’s probably the best place to start.

Here’s a list of all of Docebo’s articles on SSO. I’d recommend looking into Enabling SSO in Docebo through a Salesforce Identity and Introduction to Docebo for SAML. 

Once you’ve figured out how to provision users into Docebo via their Salesforce profile, it should be fairly simple to move your learners away from the embedded experience. At that point, you’d simply want to replace whatever method they’re using to access Docebo via Salesforce today with a link to the Docebo domain. You’ll probably also want to consider some change management since some of the navigation will be impacted (in a very positive way IMO).

@Adam Ballhaussen   Best thing I have heard all week! Our clients currently use SSO to get to the SF Community and we have another user group who accesses Docebo directly via SSO (all Gmail), so I feel like this is not going to be too wild for our IT team. Thank you for the articles I will start reading through and make notes to take back to our Salesforce/SSO team. I have them mostly on board but need to provide them all of the technical aspects. 

I can’t thank you enough for one respond and for 2 responding so quickly! I appreciate you so much and hope your transition is going well!