Smartsheet and Docebo integration

Once again, I’m super late to this thread, and I’m not sure if this would still be helpful to anyone. Furthermore, I don’t have direct experience trying to build anything with Smartsheet via Docebo Connect or its API. That said, I have built integrations between Docebo and Airtable* (a Smartsheet competitor) via Docebo Connect, so perhaps I have some insight to offer here regarding the overall approach.

We’d like to see if we can integrate our new hire learning paths and courses to a smartsheet that can then be viewed by the respective manager to review their progress.

This made me think of a couple of features that come with Docebo Learn (no add-ons needed):

• My Team, and
• Observation Checklists

A bit of cost-benefit analysis might be in order here. Docebo Connect with a Smartsheet connector is going to cost your organisation somewhere in the order of several thousand dollars a year, and you may need to spend quite some time configuring it to do what you want.

I’m going to take some artistic licence here and assume the following:

• Your onboarding Smartsheet would contain more than just the employee’s individual progress on learning plans and courses.
• It would also contain the kinds of tasks that in theory ought to be served by Observation Checklists (but which aren’t in practice, because Observation Checklists are unusable in their current form).
• You don’t want your managers to have to review some things in Docebo and some in Smartsheet, so you want to get everything into Smartsheet.

I’m also going to assume that:

• You have some kind of sync between your HRIS and Docebo already. If you don’t, that’s a much more pressing use case for Docebo Connect!
• You don’t already have any automation in place to create these Smartsheet Checklists. Which is fine, we can probably do that with Docebo Connect. Certainly you can create a sheet using Smartsheet’s API (which means Docebo Connect can do it too), but the trickier part could be untangling all the permissions-related stuff, i.e. in order to share only with the user and their manager, you may need to make one workspace per user, then share it with them and their manager only, then update the sharing permissions if the manager should change…

A few different triggers are already coming to mind:

• A new user in Docebo should trigger many things, but in this case: a new Workspace in Smartsheet, shared with the manager and maybe the user as well (if their Smartsheet account even exists). Inside that Workspace, a new sheet based on a Smartsheet template (or maybe one of a range of templates, depending on roles, etc.; you could possibly use a Lookup Table in Docebo Connect for this part).
• A user being enrolled in a course or learning plan should result in a new row being added to the Smartsheet in question.
• Said user completing one of these courses or learning plans should result in the relevant row(s) being updated.
• An aside: the create row + update row operations would be made easier in Docebo Connect by virtue of the fact that they are supported actions for Workato’s Smartsheet connector. That is, you may not need the API docs for those. Happy days!

It’s one thing to sketch this out as I have above, though, and quite another to set up the necessary webhooks, create all the recipes you’ll need, and debug until it all works (and there will be debugging). Maybe it’s worth the effort; only you can say. But I hope this helps to shed some light on the pros and cons, if too late for OP, then for someone else who stumbles across this.

* I mentioned I’ve built Airtable integrations; that was for a completely different use case. We were using that for managing courses and learning plans. Docebo’s course management is pretty decent since it was refactored, but it still has some shortcomings, and the learning plan management is still on the legacy platform (much worse). But this wasn’t the reason; the reason was that we had a large table of learning objectives that we wanted to map to our courses, and Docebo doesn’t really offer a structured way of doing that. So we made our own database in Airtable and synced parts of it with Docebo.