(v)ILT's with Teams and Outlook (without Docebo Connect)

  • 22 January 2024
  • 6 replies
  • 75 views
SNoyes
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Userlevel 1

Hi All,

I’m wondering what others are doing about the base system Outlook/Teams connection? Or what others have thought about Docebo Connect? We explored Docebo Connect this last year, but it was deemed too expensive.

The main issue we have with the base product set up is the calendar invites do not get auto loaded to outlook calendars. Users need to add the calendar invite from the notification and many of our employees do not see the emails to do this. Not all employees go through their emails very often. The same is true for the instructors as well. 

One idea we had was to email the registered employees a few days prior to the event with a link to the calendar invite and the Docebo course link. However, this means the process becomes more manual.

Anything you have done that has proven to improve this process?

Thank you,

Steph

6 replies

lrnlab
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Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Did you know you can use a built-in notification that does just that? It’s called, ILT Session Starting. You can configure it to include the calendar attachment and send it x number of days or hours before the event. You can also configure multiple templates of the same if you want to send it more than once. We use it and it works quite well.

Stephanie Dreiling
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Userlevel 7
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Yes, we have had plenty of experience with this! Here is what we do, not perfect, but employees are starting to learn. 

  1. All Employee Outlook Calendars and synced with our platform during their on-boarding as a new hire (mass training was done for employees already hired when we rolled out this plan). The “Training Calendar” is added to their Outlook and auto updated each time they are enrolled, yes they have to drag those items over to their main calendar, but we at least go through this step to help them learn, then if they ask questions we point them back to it. 
  2. Notification, notifications, notifications! 
    1. Enrollment Notification: We send an enrollment notification as soon as they are enrolled into an ILT course. This is triggered automatically and includes course details as well as attaches the calendar link for them. 
    2. One Week Notification: We send this notification because if someone has forgot to tell their boss about it or plan for it they now have a weeks notice for the training. Calendar invite is attached to this message as well 
      1. This keys off ILT Session Starting Notification. 
    3. One Day Prior: This serves as their reminder of training 24 hours in advance and is sent at 7 AM the day prior to ensure it’s one of the first things in their inbox that day before. 
    4. One Hour Prior: This seems like overkill but you’d be surprised the number of people that still tell us they had no idea they had training! Even if they enrolled it in themselves!

I highly suggest using the notifications to help yourself out, and keep plugging away at the importance of checking their calendar at least weekly to make sure they don’t miss something! 

Stephanie D.
Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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Do you have any internal automation systems? Have had success with folks using whatever system they have to basically use instead of Docebo Connect, and often they just didn’t know what their org had already. Basically you make a general calendar for all the events to go onto and then invite folks to the events. I had worked with one org who didn’t, but had a person who basically used reports of the enrollments, a pre-formatted excel template that formatted things right, and then used the import feature in Outlook to mass make events and add users to them form the calendar. If I remember right they would basically do this the week prior to events, I think they trained their interns to basically do the next day a week out each morning so it was never a ton of work on any given day, but was more manual for sure.

Stephen.Barton
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Userlevel 6
Badge +2

Hi @SNoyes 

I will apologise in advance for not being able to provide a comprehensive answer, but as something you may be able to speak to your Account Manager about, we use webhooks that call an API written by our IT dev team at Kennedys, to send invitations to Outlook calendars when they book a vILT session.

https://help.docebo.com/hc/en-us/sections/360005441800-APIs

 

Stephen.Barton
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Userlevel 6
Badge +2

Just to add, we find the additional cost of Docebo Connect a hugely negative factor in our contract with Docebo, but others may want to disagree.

SNoyes
Rank
Userlevel 1

Thank you everyone for the feedback!
Some follow up questions:

@Stephanie Dreiling Can you give me more details about the synced calendar? Did you do something in outlook or Docebo to create this calendar? I know sometimes when you open a calendar event from Docebo, it opens in a new calendar but I haven’t seen this be consistent. How did you set this all up? Also, those notifications look great! Thank you for listing them! 

@Stephen.Barton Thank you for the link! Very helpful. What is the end user experience like? Have you had any issues? Also about how much time did it take to set that up? 

 

@Bfarkas I’m not sure I’m picturing this correctly. We use outlook, teams, and snowflake is our data lake. I never thought of the import feature on Outlook. I’ll definitely look into that.
 

Thank you!!

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