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Are your learners confused by .ics files?


jmkachidurian
Helper II
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We have a global audience of customer and partner learners and deliver several VILT training courses monthly.  We have discovered that many of our learners struggle to understand how to get the multi-event sessions onto their internal calendars using the .ics files provided in their enrollment messages.

Because we don’t know what calendar applications they use internally, we have provided instructions for the finicky Outlook application, which differs depending on whether you use the desktop or web application. That doesn’t help users who use other platforms. We have complaints from learners that they don’t get an “invitation” they can just accept the way their internal calendar invitations work.

Has anyone else here run into this and if so how have you mitigated this thorny problem?

Thanks in advance for any ideas or solutions you have.

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Annarose.Peterson
Hero III
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Thanks for posting about this! Following!  


Bfarkas
Hero III
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  • Hero III
  • June 8, 2023

100% yes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, internet calendaring sucks and is ripe for a good solution for everyone. This was such a problem for us, we had to use thirdparty solution to send proper Outlook invites to users instead.


jmkachidurian
Helper II
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@Bfarkas May I ask what solution you selected?  We may need to go down that ugly road...Thanks in advance.

 


sabine.deliveroo
Influencer I
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Same. It was really important to have a good integration with calendar and our LMS. We use Google, so purchased Docebo connect for Google Calendar. Perhaps there’s also Connect for Zoom and other platforms, it’s just with an extra cost.


Bfarkas
Hero III
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  • Hero III
  • June 13, 2023
jmkachidurian wrote:

@Bfarkas May I ask what solution you selected?  We may need to go down that ugly road...Thanks in advance.

 

I used power automate to create the invites using a shared calendar for them to live on. Was an extra added on the ability since we were building a wizard for scheduling for end users to use, and a process to bulk schedule for internal scheduling, so controlled the process.

So, basically same as Connect, but had access to the resource already since was an Office365 shop.


Lucy.blake
Helper II
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We’ve been testing this and the new Outlook will allow ICS files to be added with much less fuss.

 


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