Best practice forum (Archived)

Self Registration / Temp Users Question

 
John Unnever
Self Registration / Temp Users Question
von John Unnever – Thursday, 26 January 2017, 9:15 AM
Gruppe Partners

Hello!

We have a situation in that when new employees are hired, they are required to take security training classes before they are given full security clearance and before their accounts are fully setup in our HR system.  We need a way for them to create an account in Totara (Self-registration is completely fine).. however, once their account is created in our HR system, they would then have an account created for them automatically via the HR Import utility.  This would then result in them having 2 accounts in the system and as far as i know, there is no way to merge these user accounts in Totara correct?   Would it be possible to export their learning history from the temporary self-registered account they created into their formal HR Import account that was created for them?  

Does anyone have any suggestions for this situation we are in?  Open to ideas!!  The guest access only allows them to view courses not participate or complete them correct?

Tom Ireland
Re: Self Registration / Temp Users Question
von Tom Ireland – Friday, 27 January 2017, 9:46 AM
Gruppe Totara

Hi, John

You are correct; unfortunately there is no way to merge user accounts in Totara LMS. We did have a feature in our tracker requesting this functionality, however after some internal discussion it was deemed as unsuitable due to the technicality involved and potential risks in relation to data. As you can imagine and appreciate, overwriting data - especially when there is a lot if it to think about - is risky business.

You may be able to work around your issue by exporting completion information and reimporting it as a record of prior learning, however that would only really give you course and certification completion at a high-level and not any visibility of activity completion, performance management information, etc.

Merging of user accounts usually comes down to business process and I'd normally encourage people to look at the way accounts are currently setup. For example, would it be possible to map updated information to existing accounts via HR Import? ID numbers in HR Import provide a unique identifier and could be used to update account information, including usernames. For those accounts created via email-based self registration, it makes that task a little bit more difficult, although it could still be done via an import.

Does that help at all?

Cheers.

Tom

Davo Smith
Re: Self Registration / Temp Users Question
von Davo Smith – Wednesday, 1 February 2017, 12:32 AM
Gruppe Partners

There is a Moodle plugin that can handle this to a certain extent - https://moodle.org/plugins/tool_mergeusers - but, it is by no means perfect and is more of a 'last resort', rather than something you should include in your day-to-day processes.

Craig Eves
Re: Self Registration / Temp Users Question
von Craig Eves (Totara Support) – Thursday, 2 February 2017, 12:22 PM
Gruppe Totara

Hi Davo and John

Please look at  https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9985 about why Totara think using the merge user plugin is a bad idea.

regards