Totara Learn Open Discussions

Manual Seminar booking not triggering invitation after event is in progress

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Hi,

I've encountered a challenge as T13 does not trigger email invitations for users who are manually signed up for events that are in progress (but which have sessions in the future).

I have set up a series of sessions for training that lasts 6 months (4 sessions monthly). However, for ease of administration, I've set up this series as 1 event (so that I need to sign up attendees only once). A problem appeared when I tried to sign up users after the 1st session passed. It would seem that for these users, email invitations are not triggered even though there are sessions still coming up.

Wanted to check if this is expected & can be altered on the site level?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Vlad

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Hi Vladimir,

This is expected behaviour, the Booking confirmation message (which is the one I think you're talking about) will necessarily include the earliest dates, I suspect what's happening is Totara checks if the message has been already sent, and if the first date has passed before sending.

In this case I think you'd have to make a manual intervention - either by using the 'bulk user actions' functionality or the 'Message users' tab under 'Attendees' (probably not ideal for you as the message gets sent to all users in the event).

regards,

George.

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Hi George,

thank you for confirming :)

Yes, I was referring to the seminar booking confirmation message (SBCM).

Do you think this is worth changing? I've tested & once you add a session in the future to an existing event (for which SBCMs were sent before for sessions previously inputted) new SBCM is triggered for the newly added session and the users are notified (which is very convenient).

The workaround that I've implemented is that I
1) Turn off Cancellation notification on a particular seminar activity

2) Delete sessions in the past

3) Sign up new users

This ensures that all receive relevant messages in the form of Outlook invitations.

Thank you for the advice regarding Bulk user actions or the Message users tab, but what I was hoping for is some setting tweak that would allow for the same user XP :) The workaround allows for this at the expense of some form of data loss, which is in this case OK, but not sure on other occasions.

What do you think? Enough of a use case for improvement? :)

Best,

Vlad

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Hi Vlad,

I could certainly ask our Product team to consider your proposal, but is it something which happens regularly for you, and if so why?

cheers,

George.

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Hi George,

thanx :)

To answer your questions, it doesn't happen all that often. However, this is a dedicated learning program for a big number of users with a big number of sessions. And it happens that because users don't get enrolled at the beginning of the series we get requests to sign them up & send them notifications about the upcoming sessions after the 1st or 2nd session is already in the past. However, there are much more sessions in the future & this is why I think this tweak would be useful.

I've thought about alternative ways to administrate this program. There is an option to create a bunch of seminar activities on the course & set the enrolment method to Seminar Direct Enrolment and a setting there Automatically sign users up to seminar events to "Yes". This would serve as a good functionality in any other case than the one I found myself in - having to sign up users as admin. If the action was up to the learners, I wouldn't have bothered :) However, this is a dedicated program & users are not expected to action anything in LMS, but just wait for invitations :) Had I used this way of administering, I would have to sign them up manually for every seminar activity - a task I tried to avoid.

Hope this makes sense :)

Best regards,

Vlad

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