Best Practices, Tips & Tricks

Best Practices

Here follow some suggestions for the creation of the notification description. These Best Practices are valid for any type of notification (email, in-platform or Slack).

• 4-byte Unicode characters are not supported by the platform when creating or editing a notification.
• Shortcodes referencing links will not actually create links in the platform notifications. Rather, they only contain the URL. If you want to create an active link, you have two options: the first one is to create a text and edit it with the Insert/edit link option in the toolbar adding the shortcode (e.g. [course_link]) in the URL field, and the second option is to add the HTML tag into the text body of the notification clicking the Source code option in the toolbar. The domain in the shortcode URL will refer to the domain in which the notification was created or updated, not necessarily to the domain of the recipient user. Also note that the format of all the URLs included in the shortcodes has to include the URL path without HTML tags, with the following structure:
  

  https:/www.domanin.xxx/path_url_platform

• Notifications containing login credentials. When creating new users, it is possible to send the User that has been created (by the administrator) to communicate login instructions to users, e.g. the platform link and credentials to be used (username and password). When creating users from the Users main page, the administrators are required to set a password. When creating user accounts via CSV files, via the Automation App, or through APIs, in bulk (or singularly via the same mechanisms) it is not required for administrators to supply passwords for users. No matter the use case, administrators can configure the notification by using [user_password] shortcode, which will always be substituted by the “Reset Your Password” link. For security reasons, upon clicking on the “Reset Your Password” link, the user will be prompted to enter their username or email address, so that they will receive another reset link to finally create the new password. This presents a unique workflow in which the user is created (with or without a password) and the notification that is sent to the new user contains a link to create their password, instead of providing one.
• Delayed Notifications. Most notifications are triggered immediately by the associated activity in the platform. However, there are a few activities scheduled by the platform background activities that are not instantly triggered in real time. As an example, the system monitors checklists for updates every three hours. As a result, a checklist notification could be delayed up to three hours based on the timing of the platform background activity. In addition, notifications, webhooks, and some other tasks are handled by an event bus, which is a protocol for creating events that are managed on a first-in-first-out basis. Infrastructure level limitations with the event bus could lead to delays in notifications (commonly, a delay in notifications going out can be caused by infrastructure issues or long queues).

Tips & Tricks

Please keep the following tips and tricks in mind when creating and managing notifications:

• If you are using the Extended Enterprise App, remember that your audience for notifications can be influenced by the domain in which the person who creates the notification is logged into. For example, if a message notification is scheduled, it will be sent out based on the domain the notification itself was created in (e.g. the domain where the administrator actually set up that notification). If it’s unscheduled or immediate, it will be based on the domain the notification was triggered in (i.e. where the administrator enrolled a user or where a user enrolled themself).
• When using shortcodes involving links to specific courses or sessions, please note that these do not work in the same way as deep links, meaning that the user will receive an error when clicking on the link without being enrolled in the course.
• If you want to resend the welcome notification, access the Admin Menu from the gear icon in the top right corner of your platform, then select the Users option in the E-Learning section. On the Users, main page, select all the relevant users, then use the Choose Action button at the bottom right of the page and select Send activation notification. Please note: you must have configured a notification rule for the event "User has been created (by the administrator)" and the rule must be active.
• When enrolling users into courses that are not yet published, decide on whether to send notifications for those enrollments ahead of time and be sure to turn off any notifications for enrollment prior to enrolling users. Once done with enrollment, you can re-activate the notifications. This can occur when you need to enrol users into unpublished courses to keep an enrollment history.
• When you include the [course_link] shortcode in notifications, users clicking on the link will land on a different page, depending on their user level and on whether they are logged in to the platform:
  • If the user clicking on the link is either Superadmin or a Power User (having full permissions on the linked course) logged in to the platform, they will land on the course management page.
  • If the user clicking on the link is either Superadmin or a Power User (having full permissions on the linked course) NOT logged in to the platform, they will land on the course catalogue page, in Learner View.
  • If the user level is User, they will land on the course catalogue page, in Learner View, independently from whether they are logged in to the platform
• When including the [expire_at] shortcode in notifications, remember that the time expressed in the notification received by the user is expressed in the user's timezone.
• ICS files, opened with Outlook, will open in a new calendar and not in the default calendar.