Announcement: limitations for unenrolled users' access to courses and training plans

From the LMS365 January 2022 release, courses and training plans are created as pages at the root of the SharePoint course catalog site.

With this change, every user that was enrolled in a course, which was created after the LMS365 January 2022 release, would automatically get access to other courses and training plans in the same course catalog—regardless of whether this user was invited to the course catalog itself.

This is due to the fact that all courses and training plans, created after the LMS365 January 2022 release, are now placed in the same SharePoint site. Prior to this change, courses and training plans were created as individual subsites. In this way, users that were only enrolled in a specific course or training plan would only be provided access to the SharePoint site of the course or training plan in question, and not to the SharePoint site of the course catalog or other courses and training plans within it. This would mean that these users would only have access to the specific training they were enrolled in.

As some use cases call for enrolling users in specific training, and not necessarily providing the user access to all other training in the course catalog, we reintroduced this behavior in the product with the LMS365 April 2022 release. This change aligns with the previous behavior of the product and means that learners that are not invited to the course catalog will only have access to the specific courses and training plans they are enrolled in.

The intended behavior of the LMS365 product is that if a course catalog admin would like to share access with users to all courses and training plans in a course catalog, these users should be invited to the course catalog by being added to the Users list. If users should only have access to one or more specific courses and/or training plans, then the users can be enrolled directly in this training. 

We recommend adding all relevant people to the Users list before enrolling them in respective courses or training plans. This will enable people to benefit from access to all training and prevent users from encountering an access denied message from SharePoint when they try to enter a course or training plan home page. If you want to ensure that some training can only be accessed by certain users of the course catalog, you can always utilize training audience and course targeting.

You can either add people to the Users list by adding the specific users you want to invite (this method allows you to invite a maximum of 50 users at the same time). Or you can add users to an Azure Active Directory or Microsoft 365 group and invite all members of this group to the course catalog at the same time.

See this article for guidance on how to invite users to a course catalog.

If you experience issues, please reach out to the LMS365 Support Team by creating a ticket.