Best practice forum (Archived)

The confusing "Certification due date" - upgrading from 2.5.23.1 to 2.5.28.1

Hi, we are testing our new build for 2.5.28.1 on the sandbox and found this issue.

For some reason, some changeset between 2.5.23.1 and 2.5.28.1 might have trigger this behavior, although I'm not sure which changeset. Basically, as you can see in the following screenshots. before the upgrade (2.5.23.1), the user Adam, shows his "certification due date" is 3/31/2015:

However, after the upgrade (2.5.28.1), the same user Adam, now shows that his "certification due date" is 9/2/2015.

Does anyone know why, and which "changeset" this behavior is related to?

We know that for the "Status" and "Renewal status" strings changes are due to TL-6544, but not sure about why the "certification due date" would be changed too.

Also, if you click on the "Previous completion" (1) link, you will see:

This is consistent before and after the upgrade.

Basically this is what happened.

Last year (2014) we rolled out this "Hearing Conservation" training at around March 2014 (as a one-time only training "program"). And this user Adam completed the training on 4/28/2014.

Then, this year at around March 1st, 2015, we rolled out another automated recurring annual "certification" (with one month of due date), in the hope that it will replace the old "one-time" only training program that we rolled out in 2014. I think this is why in the first screenshot, we are seeing the "certification due date" as March 31st, 2015.

So you could imagine that in the "Messages" tab setting, we did not have the "enrollment" message setup. We only had the "RECERTIFICATION WINDOW OPEN" message setup, as well as the "RECERTIFICATION WINDOW DUE TO CLOSE" message setup (for 1 week and 1 day).

Now I wonder for 2.5.28.1, which "date" would the "RECERTIFICATION WINDOW DUE TO CLOSE" use for sending out automated messages? For the "Recertification date" option, we are using the "Use certification completion date" (user dependent). So for Adam, he completed this training this year (2015) on 4/23/2015. Would he get the next RECERTIFICATION WINDOW OPEN message on 3/23/2016 next year? Thanks!

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Hi Wen.

If, after reading this reply, you've still got problems then please file a zoho ticket through your Totara partner. I just want to comment on a few things I noticed that might be relevant.

In TL-6544, we changed the strings for some statuses. "Completed" was changed to "Certified". This more acurately describe the state that the user's certification is in. Because certification status changes over time, unlike programs, "Completion" should be considered an event that occurs at one specific moment, whereas "Certified" is the status that a user can be in for some length of time.

I just got assigned a ticket to investigate the missing Renewal Status value (reported by someone else). It turns out that TL-6544 also changed the Renewal Status column, and introduced a small bug. The intention of the change was that there would be no message in the Renewal Status column for users who have not yet completed the certification since first being assigned. It should as simple to fix as changing "if ($renewalstatus &&..." to "if ($renewalstatus !== null &&...", or something like that. Sorry about that.

The Certification Due Date is a bit trickier to figure out. In the upgrade script for T-13550, we copied the expiry date over the due date for all certified users, and when a new expiry date is set it will also update the due date. The idea is that the due date for a certified user should ALWAYS be the same as their expiry date. In the example you've got above, I'm not surprised to see that the due date changed, but I don't know why it changed to "September" rather than "23 April 2016". I suggest you file a ticket to get this investigated.

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

Thanks for trying to help out.

I wonder if there are some Totara clients out there who had tried to "convert" an existing "one-time" only training "program" into a automated recurring (annual) certification. This is a special use case. Basically we rolled out whole bunch of "one-time" only training "programs" last March when we first started using Totara, and back then the team did not know about this "certification" feature. Now we want to convert these "programs" into "certifications" (but still keep the "course" completion data from last year). We ended up launching new certifications that consist with the same (single) course, but we have experienced some weird issues (such as Exception Reports and "certification due date"). Any experience or insight about best practices with such special use case would be much appreciated. We are running 2.5.23.1.

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By the way, we have always been using "Use certification completion date" for the Recertification date (under the Certification tab). The whole idea is to allow each individual learner to maintain their own calendar for each certification, and to allow staggering (instead of learners suddenly have to finish 15+ single topic annual recurring training all at once)...

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