Email address changes and avoiding user record duplication...

  • 22 September 2022
  • 8 replies
  • 139 views

Userlevel 2
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Hi all,

We are nearing launch with the Docebo platform, currently we will manage our user records via CSV upload from our Workday system → Docebo. This is a daily upload managed via the automation app.

I was planning to use employee ID number as our unique identifier/username, but I.T. have advised that because of how our SSO is configured, we need to use email address or the SSO won’t work.

We regularly encounter email address changes as users move department, role, business area etc., many of our different areas have unique @ handles. My concern is that this will end up creating duplicate records because the system thinks that it’s a new user...is this correct?

If so, is there any way to prevent this from happening? and if not, would anyone be able to share the best recommended course of action for managing this effectively, I can see it becoming quite time-consuming to go through and compare/merge user records every time this happens!

Appreciate your help,

Rob


8 replies

Userlevel 7
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HI @robjardim we have a very similar issue...when the process is automated though, it gets much more difficult to manage. There is a way to change a username via the CSV import however this will not eliminate the initial issue you may encounter. 

You would almost need to have some kind of process to pre-scrub your data before you run updates. This would require you to know the before and after value for any individual which itself can be an issue...maybe your IT team can share that with you?

You also have a tool to merge profiles should you encounter this issue on profiles where users have courses in progress or completed. It’s not great but does allow you to consolidate data on 1 profile.

All this to say that right now, we only mange this manually, unfortunately.

Hoper you find something useful here.

Userlevel 7
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The feed that is generating new users, are they able to identify the cases that are not actually new users, but an email update? They could then identify these during the email update process and merge the accounts? More automation work but doable. IT should be able to handle that though especially since they are creating the issue :)

We used to essentially have this separated from the normal update flow and was related to the rest of IT’s email/name change update process.

Userlevel 2
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Thanks for the answers, I think easiest solution would be for me to ask IT to put a step into their process to notify me on address changes - and also notify our Workday admin so that they are aware too :) I will check in with IT.

Thanks for your help!

Userlevel 7
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Nice, definitely at least notify…but encourage to push, if they are notifying they can do other steps too and then you don’t have to do manual steps :)

Userlevel 2
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Same problem and there isn’t any solution from Docebo. I continue to miss Cornerstone every day. Hope things get better by the end of our contract. :-\

Userlevel 6
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We had this same problem!  I manually check for newly created accounts once daily… to help easily identify accounts that are likely to result from and email address change, I compare with another profile field we recently added - Hire Date.  This date pulled over on our FTP feed from our HR system, so we added an additional profile field to store this on employee accounts on Docebo.  So when I view Employees on Docebo by Creation date - I look for any created that day where the Hire Date is in the past. So if an account has a creation date of Jan 20, 2023, and their hire date was Oct 1, 2021, then I know it should not be a new account. Unfortunately, from there it’s still a manual process, but that at least makes it easier to visually spot these cases.

From there, I look up the employee on Docebo and our HR system and verify that they had an existing account on Docebo and that it was in fact from an email address change.  If so, I delete the new account and then go edit the existing one with the new email address.  I then email that person to let them know to use the new address next time they log in (until we fully implement our AD integration for logging in).

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sjennings78 - this is a great idea about cross-referencing creation date against the last hire date. We also have “Last Hire Date” as one of our additional fields.

What my team decided to do was check daily for duplicates using the “Employee ID” additional field that we setup at inception. If it counts duplicates, it let’s us know and we go through and delete the old account/update the username with the new login.

Since we use SSO for login, They could potentially get into their new account if we miss the update, so I’ve contacted our IT/ID Team to provide us with a notification when a change like this is coming.

Userlevel 6
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We haven’t been using them before, but I am working on getting our Employee ID numbers added to all profiles.  Once those are in place, that’s another check I can use to look for these duplicate accounts. Thanks, @JasonHailer. We had started exploring using the IDs for the unique identifier (username) on Docebo, but it sounds like we may have the same issue with SSO wanting to look for email addresses, but having those IDs on there will definitely help us track down duplicate accounts for sure!

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