Best Answer

Best practice for merging users

  • 18 January 2022
  • 4 replies
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Daniel
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Hi all,

We’ve encountered our first case where we need to merge users and I was wondering if anyone has any advice about the best practice for doing this. We need to merge the user because their company name and email address have changed. The Merge User function in Docebo makes it pretty easy to merge the source user into the destination user, but having done this, the source user remains. In this case, is it best practice to delete or retain the source user?

Thanks,

Daniel

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Best answer by alekwo 18 January 2022, 09:51

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alekwo
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Hi @Daniel the key thing to consider about their learning history, is that the merge function can only transfer course enrollments.

It does not transfer enrollments in Learning Plans - so depending on how much your site depends on  Learning Plans, people may get confused after the merge, as they will need to re-enroll themselves into learning plans to get back to where they were before the merge.

Also, if they have a history of viewing assets in Coach&Share channels, creating playlists, commenting, or asking Questions to Experts - those won’t be transferred using merge.

In your scenario, my approach would be to rather change their usernames/emails on their existing accounts instead of creating a new account and merging data. In that way a full history of their actions, learning plans, comments, etc. will be preserved and available to them after the change. Also, from the reporting perspective, data will be more consistent (you won’t artificially inflate the number of users).

-- Alek Oleszkiewicz - linkedin.com/in/aleko
Daniel
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Userlevel 7
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In your scenario, my approach would be to rather change their usernames/emails on their existing accounts instead of creating a new account and merging data. In that way a full history of their actions, learning plans, comments, etc. will be preserved and available to them after the change. Also, from the reporting perspective, data will be more consistent (you won’t artificially inflate the number of users).

Many thanks for this suggestion @alekwo. It’s not something I had considered because our system automatically imports a new user if the username changes. Seeing two users, I assumed we needed to merge them. Your suggestion of just changing the username/email of the existing account makes much more sense. I was wondering though, in which situation would we need to merge two accounts?

alekwo
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@Daniel I use merge in cases when people have two accounts both with some learning history - for example one created with their private address, and a second one with a company address.

 

-- Alek Oleszkiewicz - linkedin.com/in/aleko
lrnlab
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HI @Daniel agree with @alekwo we use both methods but in the case where you want to activate the new account, we do not delete the old profile, we simply set an expire date on it and add a note to reference the new profile.

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