We are in the process of implementing the Salesforce app, primarily to surface our partners’ certification status (done through completion of certification learning plans). I’d love to hear from those of you who have already implemented this. What advice do you have? Best practices? Things we should be aware of? Mistakes we can learn from?
Thanks,
Shannon
Best answer by Adam Ballhaussen
very long post alert. TL;DR – test your data early and often, there’s lots of great documentation, make friends with your Salesforce admin 🙂
Hey
At my previous organization, I was among some of the first Docebo customers to adopt the beta release of the V3 SF integration back in 2019. In the early days of our integration, I experienced some of the same frustrations and struggles that
Integration/Setup ease of use – as Chet shared, the initial setup is super straightforward and in my mind, the UI for the integration on the Docebo side is very user-friendly. You can run syncs, configure notifications, pull logs, update field mappings, and change a number of integration settings directly from the UI.
User/Contact Sync – as Chet shared, this typically runs without a hitch. At my previous organization, we were syncing SFDC Users to Docebo Users. This worked swimmingly for us as we were also able to use SAML to provision users directly into Docebo and sync all of their information from SF into Docebo as additional fields. This, in my mind, is one of the strongest aspects of the entire SF integration.
Certification Data – indeed information from the Certifications & Retraining app does not sync from Docebo to Salesforce. The native integration is limited to syncing information for Users, Courses, Learning Plans, and Sessions. This Salesforce V3 Data Model knowledge article is really helpful when it comes to understanding what syncs from Docebo to Salesforce and how it’s all related.
At my previous organization, we used the same approach you seem to be using, where we reported on Learning Plan completion in SF as a part of our certification tracking. Interestingly enough, we facilitated our certification exams through Kryterion Webassessor, a 3rd party exam hosting and proctoring solution. The score information for our exams synced back to Salesforce to a separate custom object that we then synced back to Docebo to the External Training app. It’s enough to make your head spin, but our Salesforce and IT teams were awesome and made all of our dreams come true via API.
Depending on your use case and the resources at your disposal, you could explore building a separate integration between any app in Docebo (like Certifications and Retraining) and a custom object in Salesforce. I’d advise on building these custom integrations sparingly as they can sometimes bring more work than value.
Learning Plan Data Accuracy – I feel Chet’s pain on this one. It took us months and months to clean up our data and understand where things were going wrong after we initially set up the integration. We too had issues with Learning Plan reporting accuracy when we first launched. At the end of the day, it’s really difficult to get clean Salesforce data, and this can often lead to inconsistencies in integrations like these.
If you plan to sync Learning Plans, I recommend starting with a small subset of Docebo data like a specific window of time – a day or a week – of enrollments for a single learning plan. Then compare the information sent to Salesforce line by line with the information you have in Docebo. Don’t just look at reports for Learning Plan enrollments, but rather look at all of the custom objects related to Learning Plans in Salesforce:
Basically,
Understanding those connections can really help you understand where to look for missing information. Identifying that something’s missing in any one of those objects can significantly help you and Docebo’s support team get to the bottom of the issue (if there is one).
I share all of this information hoping that it can help you and others who might discover this thread. As long as you test the data you plan to sync in small chunks, you should be in good shape.
Tips:
Advice:
Hi Shannon,
I hate to be a “negative Nancy” about this one and I sincerely hope that you don’t run into the same issues as we have, but we’ve been trying to get the Salesforce app to work since December and have had very little luck.
First off, the integration/setup wasn’t that difficult. We followed all of the instructions provided by Docebo. We have been able to sync all of our users and contacts with no issue. These are set to sync on an hourly basis and they continue to work without issues.
Everything else has been a nightmare. We have the courses and learning plans syncing in real time. The Enrollments syncing is set to “real time” which basically means every 15 minutes. Here are the problems:
There’s no such thing as syncing certification data. It doesn’t exist. Only courses and Learning Plans. So, as long as your certifications are based on the completion of a learning plan, you’ll just be using the learning plan data in Salesforce to report your certifications. In my mind (and in the minds of nearly everyone in our organization), this is a MAJOR oversight in the Salesforce app. Why not sync certification data? We have been told by Docebo that if we want certification data in Salesforce, we can pay Docebo’s professional services extra to build an API that transfers it. 
Additionally, adding certification data to the app is not a feature currently on the roadmap for further development on the app.
Furthermore, reporting on learning plan completion data would be a decent workaround for us, except for the fact that the Learning Plan data is INACCURATE! We can pull a Learning Plan Enrollment report from Docebo and then pull a Learning Plan Enrollment report from Salesforce and then compare the two and see massive discrepancies. This has been going on since December. Docebo has released several new versions of the Salesforce app that was supposed to fix this, but we have not seen any improvement. We’ve tried uninstalling the app completely and reinstalling it (which forced us to have to recreate any Salesforce dashboards we created around the data). We’ve tried manually syncing data month by month. We’ve tried everything we know to try and, still, we can’t get accurate data from Docebo to Salesforce. We’re literally working with Docebo’s tech support on a daily basis trying to get this fixed to no avail.
I really do hope you have much better luck with it than we have. It looks like your post was 19 days ago, so if you have any lessons learned or feedback from your implementation of the app, I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts.
+1
+4very long post alert. TL;DR – test your data early and often, there’s lots of great documentation, make friends with your Salesforce admin 🙂
Hey
At my previous organization, I was among some of the first Docebo customers to adopt the beta release of the V3 SF integration back in 2019. In the early days of our integration, I experienced some of the same frustrations and struggles that
Integration/Setup ease of use – as Chet shared, the initial setup is super straightforward and in my mind, the UI for the integration on the Docebo side is very user-friendly. You can run syncs, configure notifications, pull logs, update field mappings, and change a number of integration settings directly from the UI.
User/Contact Sync – as Chet shared, this typically runs without a hitch. At my previous organization, we were syncing SFDC Users to Docebo Users. This worked swimmingly for us as we were also able to use SAML to provision users directly into Docebo and sync all of their information from SF into Docebo as additional fields. This, in my mind, is one of the strongest aspects of the entire SF integration.
Certification Data – indeed information from the Certifications & Retraining app does not sync from Docebo to Salesforce. The native integration is limited to syncing information for Users, Courses, Learning Plans, and Sessions. This Salesforce V3 Data Model knowledge article is really helpful when it comes to understanding what syncs from Docebo to Salesforce and how it’s all related.
At my previous organization, we used the same approach you seem to be using, where we reported on Learning Plan completion in SF as a part of our certification tracking. Interestingly enough, we facilitated our certification exams through Kryterion Webassessor, a 3rd party exam hosting and proctoring solution. The score information for our exams synced back to Salesforce to a separate custom object that we then synced back to Docebo to the External Training app. It’s enough to make your head spin, but our Salesforce and IT teams were awesome and made all of our dreams come true via API.
Depending on your use case and the resources at your disposal, you could explore building a separate integration between any app in Docebo (like Certifications and Retraining) and a custom object in Salesforce. I’d advise on building these custom integrations sparingly as they can sometimes bring more work than value.
Learning Plan Data Accuracy – I feel Chet’s pain on this one. It took us months and months to clean up our data and understand where things were going wrong after we initially set up the integration. We too had issues with Learning Plan reporting accuracy when we first launched. At the end of the day, it’s really difficult to get clean Salesforce data, and this can often lead to inconsistencies in integrations like these.
If you plan to sync Learning Plans, I recommend starting with a small subset of Docebo data like a specific window of time – a day or a week – of enrollments for a single learning plan. Then compare the information sent to Salesforce line by line with the information you have in Docebo. Don’t just look at reports for Learning Plan enrollments, but rather look at all of the custom objects related to Learning Plans in Salesforce:
Basically,
Understanding those connections can really help you understand where to look for missing information. Identifying that something’s missing in any one of those objects can significantly help you and Docebo’s support team get to the bottom of the issue (if there is one).
I share all of this information hoping that it can help you and others who might discover this thread. As long as you test the data you plan to sync in small chunks, you should be in good shape.
Tips:
Advice:
Thank you,
Thanks so much,
Patty
Does anyone have a Salesforce partner that you are satisfied with that you used for extended integration of the Salesforce Managed Package?
+1We are in the process of implementing the Salesforce app, primarily to surface our partners’ certification status (done through completion of certification learning plans). I’d love to hear from those of you who have already implemented this. What advice do you have? Best practices? Things we should be aware of? Mistakes we can learn from?
Thanks,
Shannon
+4
Here’s a list of all of Docebo’s articles on SSO. I’d recommend looking into Enabling SSO in Docebo through a Salesforce Identity and Introduction to Docebo for SAML.
Once you’ve figured out how to provision users into Docebo via their Salesforce profile, it should be fairly simple to move your learners away from the embedded experience. At that point, you’d simply want to replace whatever method they’re using to access Docebo via Salesforce today with a link to the Docebo domain. You’ll probably also want to consider some change management since some of the navigation will be impacted (in a very positive way IMO).
+1
I can’t thank you enough for one respond and for 2 responding so quickly! I appreciate you so much and hope your transition is going well!
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