Totara Learn Open Discussions

Seminar events with multiple sessions

 
Natalia Kurikova
Seminar events with multiple sessions
بواسطة Tuesday, 4 April 2023, 5:50 PM - Natalia Kurikova
مجموعة Helpful contributor 2024مجموعة Learn Site Administratorمجموعة Most helpful contributor 2023

Hello everyone

We use quite a few seminars in our system; some have events with multiple sessions on multiple days.

In events with one session, confirmation emails contain the calendar meetings, which get added to the participants' Outlook calendar. However, for multi-session events the emails look like there is no calendar invite included. I've looked at the email source code, and the session date/times are there, but Outlook doesn't seem to recognise it. I've tried gmail, and it adds the first session into the Google calendar, but not the following ones. 

So it looks like what's described in this post about patchy ical support for events with multiple days. The post is from 2012; is the issue still present?

I've enabled the setting recommended in the post (Site Administration -> Plugins -> Activities -> Face-to-face -> One message per day), but it's pretty clunky:

1. Now, managers receive more than one approval request email: one per each session. But they need to approve it only once, so they're essentially getting spammed with extra emails.

2. The confirmation emails look identical, so our users think they're getting duplicate emails. Can we customise those confirmations per session? We'd like one to say "Conformation - Session 1" and another "Confirmation - session 2" or something along those lines.

We're on Version 15.17 (Build: 20230322.00).

Craig Eves
Re: Seminar events with multiple sessions
بواسطة Thursday, 13 April 2023, 8:09 PM - Craig Eves (Totara Support)
مجموعة Totara

Hi Natalia

I can't see anywhere where message per session can be modified , the session information gets placed in a loop with all sessions and not able to be individually selected.

The message body could make it clear that they will receive an notification for each session and this only needs to actioned once 

regards



Chris Myatt
Re: Seminar events with multiple sessions
بواسطة Monday, 15 May 2023, 3:59 PM - Chris Myatt
 

I would agree this is an issue.

iCal does not have good support for multi-day events but selecting "One message per day" spams managers to approve each day. The user should receive an iCal for each day and the manager should only receive one email to approve the booking for the single event over multiple days.

Natalia Kurikova
Re: Seminar events with multiple sessions
بواسطة Tuesday, 23 May 2023, 9:51 PM - Natalia Kurikova
مجموعة Helpful contributor 2024مجموعة Learn Site Administratorمجموعة Most helpful contributor 2023

Looks like this has been fixed - noticed that our managers get one approval request email even when there are multiple sessions. Most likely was addressed in these releases. Perhaps it's under TL-36486 (Fixed multiple approvals for the same seminar attendee being possible in Tasks block). We're now on 15.18 (Build: 20230428.00) and the last time the managers got duplicate emails was around 26 April. Would have been nice to get a heads-up that this has been fixed, but anyway, I'm very glad it's now more user-friendly. :) Thank you, Totara peeps :)

Luc Analbers
Re: Seminar events with multiple sessions
بواسطة Thursday, 22 August 2024, 1:38 AM - Luc Analbers
 

Hello,
We are using iCal notifications for Seminar events with multiple sessions in Totara 13 succefuly. Meaning that all the multiple events are placed into the Outlook calendars of the subscribed users automatically (They don't have to open an iCal attachment). So a course that have 3 seminar events (like one on Monday at 09:00 - 12:00, One on Tuesday at 10:00 - 12:00 and one on Friday at 09:30 - 11:30) will show up in the Outlook calendar on all days perfectly.

But in Totara 18 this doesn't seem to work anymore (We only receive this as iCal attachments).
We did activate the global "One message per date" setting.

Can anyone confirm that direct placement in Outlook agendas still should work in Totara 18, so we can investigate what we did wrong, or is this notification for seminar events with multiple sessions, directly in the Outlook calendars not possible anymore?
I cannot find any changes mentioned about this in the release notes.
Any suggestion?

PS: A Single event works fine, meaning it is placed directly in the Outlook calendar.
The problem only occurs when we have seminars with multiple sessions.