Outlook, Calendar Attachments, and Calendar Links

  • 14 August 2021
  • 28 replies
  • 2276 views

Userlevel 4

Hi all - I’m new to Docebo, but not new to LMS and workplace learning. I’d like to know how others handle calendaring for ILT / VILT events. I’ve set up my first VILT in the system, an 8 week course that meets every Friday. I’ve set it up as a course with one session and 8 events.

Upon successful enrollment, learners are sent a notification that includes a calendar attachment. When the user opens the calendar attachment, it creates a new calendar in Outlook called Untitled. The 8 events are saved in the Untitled calendar as 8 separate events. Here are the issues that I’m trying to resolve:

  • The event is in a new calendar and not in the learner’s calendar so the time is not blocked out. The user must copy it or invite themselves to the event.
  • If the event time changes or is cancelled, the user’s copied calendar entry does not update.
  • The workarounds appear to have users add their Docebo My Calendar as an add’l outlook calendar (this resolves the sync issue) and invite themselves to each event to which they’re enrolled. Alternatively, we can have a coordinator invite folks to each event and update everyone if something changes.

Anyway, it all seems more clunky than I expected from a system that’s supposed to manage events like these. I’d like to know how others manage this for ILT / VILT.


28 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

@stefano.bonacina if your IT dept is still keeping to internal hosted solutions, they must be supporting custom applications still as a result of it (big selling point of going to cloud is leveraging the Office365 API which lets things like what Docebo did, happen, not remotely the same for on prem) I get it can be a project at that point, but have you tried getting onto their roadmap?

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

We are currently including the calendar attachment on some ILT notifications, but since they do not sync with the event for any changes in the time, I hesitate to use them for most sessions.  Also, and somehow this is the BIG issue for most people - they want to get a reminder in their calendar - BUT… the calendar attachments we get on the notifications do not have a reminder set on them.  We include instructions on how to save the attachment and a note to set the reminder, but this appears to be too complicated or hard to “remember” for most users.  The export option from My Calendar does the same thing - I am not seeing reminders set on the calendar events by default.

Userlevel 4
Badge

Anyone having trouble with calendar attachments not working properly recently? We have used the ics calendar attachment for ILTs in the email notifications in the past. As of today, the accept button does not respond, so the user ends up adding multiple instances of the event to their Outlook calendar. 

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