How to work with notifications in TalentLMS

The TalentLMS Notifications are automated emails that notify your users, instructors, and administrators of specific events.

Notifications can be:

Sent when an event happens, as an update (e.g., to notify users that their assignments have been graded), or before it happens, as a reminder (e.g., to remind users of an upcoming ILT session).
Triggered by a specific condition (e.g., a user has been created X hours ago but hasn’t signed in yet).
Made available to specific branches, where Branch Admins can view and customize their content for their branch users.

To create your first notification in TalentLMS, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your TalentLMS account as an Administrator in the main domain, go to Notifications (1), and click Add notification (2).

2. Type a Name (3) for your notification in the respective field.
3. From the Event (4) drop-down list, choose the event that triggers it. Events can be related to users, courses, learning paths, certifications, assignments, instructor-led training, groups, or branches:

User

On user creation
On user signup
X hours after user signup
X hours after user signup, and the user has not made a purchase
X hours after user creation
X hours after user creation, and the user has not signed in
X hours after user signup, and the user has not signed in
X hours since user last signed in
X hours since the user first signed in, and the user has not completed any course
X hours before user deactivation
On course self-assignment
On user payment
On level X reached

Course

On course assignment
X hours after course acquisition
X hours before the course starts
On course completion
X hours after course completion
On course failure
On course expiration
X hours before course expiration
On course request submission
On course request approval
On course request decline

Learning path

On learning path assignment
X hours after learning path acquisition
On learning path completion

Certificate

On certificate acquisition
On certificate expiration
X hours before certificate expiration

Assignment

On assignment submission
On assignment grading

Instructor-led training

On ILT session create
On ILT session registration
X hours before an ILT session starts
On ILT grading

Group/Branch

On group assignment
On branch assignment

Note: To use Notifications as reminders for completing a course, choose one of the below events:

X hours after course acquisition
X hours before course expiration
These are only triggered when the user has not completed the course yet.

4. After you select an event, the Rulesets menu will appear, where you can choose variables for your notification (e.g, Time, Recipient).

Under the When (5) tab within Rulesets, you can see the specific event/action for triggering the notification.

Use the Filter by (6) option to associate your notification with specific TalentLMS elements.
You can always filter a notification by Branch, while additional filters may be available depending on the event you have selected. If no branch filter is applied, the notification is available in all branches.

Note: The available filter options are Course, Group, Branch, and Learning Path. The Branch filter is available for all notification events, while the availability of the Course, Group, and Learning Path filters depends on the event. Most course-related notifications, as well as ILT and Assignment notifications, can also be filtered by Course, while notifications related to Groups or Learning Paths can additionally be filtered by Group or Learning Path, respectively.

5. From the Recipient (7) drop-down list, choose a recipient for your notification. It can be a specific user or all users assigned to the course (found as ‘Related user’), an instructor, or some type of administrator. Please note that the available options in this drop-down menu will vary based on the Event you have selected.

Note the ‘Specific recipients’ option: selecting it sends a copy of the notification to the specified email(s) every time the event triggers, regardless of the user involved. For example, if 50 users are assigned a course under an “on course assignment” notification with a specific recipient, that email address will receive 50 individual emails.

6. In the Message body (8) text area, do as follows:

On the first line, type a subject for your notification email (e.g., Your course {course_name} expired), and press Enter to change lines.
Then, type your notification (e.g., Dear {related_user_first_name}, the course "{course_name}" expired today).
Finally, add a footer with some basic notification info (e.g., This email was sent from {site_url} at {time}).

Note: Use the smart tags (9) below the Message body text area to pull the corresponding information (user email, username, course name, etc.) from your system. In your text, each tag appears in curly brackets (e.g., {course_name}). To each recipient, the notification is sent with the brackets replaced by their corresponding values (e.g., the name of the course). The available Smart Tags are determined by the specific combination of Event and Recipient you have chosen. Select only from the tags provided in the drop-down menu; if you enter a Smart Tag manually that does not appear in the menu, the tag will not be processed.

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7. Click on the Send preview email (10) area to preview your email template by sending it to your account’s email address. Hit the Send (11) button to send an email copy.

Note: Smart tags won't work on test emails. The preview notification feature is not available on the Free plan.

8. Click Save (12) to save your settings and create the notification.

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After you save the notification the Branch customizations (13) option becomes available. Click it to review which branches have customized the notification. To learn more about how to set up notifications for branches and review any customizations made, see this article.

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Note: The notification events that can be triggered depend on how users are added to TalentLMS:

When users sign up through SSO, the On user signup notification event cannot be triggered.
Use X hours after user signup instead.
When users are created through SCIM provisioning, the On user create notification event cannot be triggered. Use X hours after user creation instead.
When users are created through the API, the On user signup and X hours after user signup notification events can be triggered.
When users are created through BambooHR, the On user create and X hours after user creation notification events can be triggered.

For users managed through SSO or SCIM, account management is performed through the IdP, so users should receive their account information through the IdP.

When users sign up through SSO and a default group has already been added to the portal, the course self-assignment notification event is triggered for courses that belong to the default group