How do I set up a testing environment within a Bridge account?

In this article, we will walk through setting up a testing environment within your Bridge instance for both Learn and Perform.

USERS

First, prior to enabling auto CSV, you can add in a handful of users to test smart groups, roles and permissions, and enrollments.

SIDE NOTE. When auto CSV is enabled, it will terminate any users who are provisioned into the account and are not on the file upload. If you would like to keep any test users, they will need to be part of that upload. The workaround is to make them Account Admins, which will keep them in the account during a sync.

You can download a sample user upload file below:

Users Upload [CSV].xlsx
Customer and Partner Users Upload [CSV].xlsx

 

In the file, you will see these fields, which we are using for smart group creation:

  • Job Title
  • Department
  • Manager Group
  • New Hire Group
  • State

We recommend using your custom fields for testing. You will be able to add and remove fields in the future. When manually updating users via CSV, you can add a new or update an existing single custom field in addition to the UIDs without having any impact on the other fields.

SIDE NOTE. If at any point in time, you want to manually add a single user and you want to do it within the Bridge interface, adding the user’s email will populate both the UID and the email fields (sending the user a welcome email if notifications are turned on). Adding in any other character string will populate the UID field only.

We used the “Add via CSV” function to upload the following users:

They all appear in the Admin > Users & Permissions > Manage Users:

All users were uploaded with values in the custom fields.

ROLES

Once uploaded, we modified the roles of each user to match their respective names.

SIDE NOTE. The manager role cannot be assigned via the “modify roles” function. It will be assigned to any user whose UID is placed into the manager UID field upon upload or whose name is selected from the dropdown in the admin tools for user management (an ID that does not yet exist as a user in Bridge cannot be added as a manager).

The upload will require that an ID exist as a user. That ID should then be in the manager UID column that will be mapped upon upload.

The name affiliated with that manager UID will then show for the direct report’s user in the admin tools for user management.

The remaining roles can all be assigned using the “modify roles” function:

SIDE NOTE. Do not select any other roles for these testing users or it will impact permissions and show inaccessible areas of Bridge for those with only the one permission.

Now that the roles are assigned, you can masquerade as each of these users to test what happens to the side navigation. If there are things that you wish were accessible to a certain role, you can create a custom role based on the role you have assigned and then modify the permissions.

The Account Admin user will have full access in Bridge.

The manager user will have limited visibility to users and will only see a single group called “My Learners” that is all of their direct reports. In the view below, the manager has full permissions. There is the ability to limit permissions for managers, specifically authoring and enrolling of users, which you can read more about that here.

SIDE NOTE. The manager role is the only role that silos visibility to a subset of users. Assigning any role to a user will mean potentially exposing that elevated user to info from all users in the account (depending on the permissions).

The author user will see all courses and can edit and enroll learners in those courses.

If you would like for the Author role to have the ability to also other learning items, you can modify the permissions of the role by going to Admin > Users & Permissions > Roles & Permissions. Find the permissions for the specific learning item, and then add “Author” as a role that has that permission.

The HR user was assigned the Advanced Analytics Analyst role, which means that they can see all user data in Analytics, including pulling and scheduling reports. 

It also means that this user can access the more robust BI tool through Analytics if they choose (more info here).

The learner user will see their Learning page, Journeys, and profile (if enabled).

GROUPS

Now we are going to create some groups using the values from the custom fields of the users that we manually uploaded.

You can see here that we’ve started to create groups based on location for all users, location for managers, location for new hires, and whether or not they are marked as Y or N for the new hire group (we also have a list here of popular smart groups to consider).

SIDE NOTE. Groups can only be created off of values that exist for the users in the admin tools for user management. Groups cannot be created for future values. Adding a future value to a test user, creating the group, and then removing that value for a user in the system will keep the group with zero users affiliated to it. Adding that value to a user in the future would move that user into the smart group appropriately.

An option to test group behavior is to create a manual group with your test users.

Call it “Test Group” and manually add in those users.

Manual groups will not change based on custom fields, so this is a way that you can test group enrollment behavior with notifications enabled in your account.

ENROLLMENTS

With your test users and group in place, you can now test enrollment behaviors, including notifications. Since all users have your email (or an alias of your email), you can monitor the end-to-end experience.

SIDE NOTE. Data in Bridge cannot be hard deleted. Actions taken in these tests will remain in the database and will populate as part of any sort of data dump/download of all data.

Here are a few suggestions:

As you may start to set up real content in this process, we recommend becoming familiar with these enrollment good-to-knows.

PERFORM

If you have our performance suite, you can also test these functionalities.

SIDE NOTE. Perform notifications cannot be enabled or disabled granularly like Learn. All notifications need to be on, including Learn, for Perform notifications to send. To test, you can individually disable the Learn notifications and the Perform notifications will send.

Here are a few suggestions:

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