Transitioning to new performance activity notifications

As of Totara 17, performance activity notifications are handled using the centralised notification system. If you were using notifications for performance activities in Totara Perform prior to Totara 17, you may need to transition your existing notifications.

When the notifications are migrated, any performance activity notifications in Totara Perform prior to Totara 17 will be enabled in the centralised notification system. The notification triggers and participants that were available in Totara Perform are now available as part of the centralised notification system. Any custom notifications you have developed for Totara Perform will not be migrated.

For new Totara sites

If you are new to Totara and just starting out then you do not need to do anything, as all Totara Perform notifications will be managed and delivered using the modernised notification system.

By default:

• The same four notifications that were available in earlier versions of Totara Perform are enabled
• All notification placeholders previously available in Totara Perform (and all the other shared placeholders available within the centralised notifications system) are available to use
• All the notification triggers previously available in Totara Perform are available within centralised notifications

Simply start using the new system, more guidance for which can be found on the Using centralised notifications page.

For existing Totara sites

If you were using performances activities in Totara Perform prior to Totara 17, the following changes will occur when upgrading to Totara 17.

Administrators will see the new centralised notifications interface on the Notifications tab of existing performance activities. The factory notifications will be disabled, and custom notifications will be set up based on how the notifications were configured prior to upgrading. By default, there will be one custom notification for the subject and another for all other recipients, although separate notifications will be created if strings were previously customised for different recipients. The experience will remain the same for participants in existing performance activities, except that configuration of user notification preferences isn't carried over.

If the multilang filter is enabled and your site has multiple language packs installed, the strings for each language will appear in separate language blocks in the notification UI.

Changes to default notifications

In Totara 17 the factory notifications for performance activities replicate the default notifications that were previously available. However, each notification has two versions - one for performance activity subjects, and one for non-subject participants. This allows you to configure the notification content separately for subjects and participants.

Scheduling notifications

When creating or editing notifications, you can use the Schedule setting to determine whether each notification will send On notification trigger event, a number of Days before, or a number of Days after the trigger event. For example, you can use the Participant due date reminder trigger to configure reminder notifications for activity participants, sending a notification two days after a due date to let the participant know their activity is overdue.

Legacy appraisals and 360 feedback notifications

The notifications from the legacy performance features available in Totara Learn will not change, and will not be migrated to the centralised notifications system. If you are moving to Totara Perform's performance activities, you will need to recreate these notifications.

Custom Perform notifications

If your site has custom notifications for performance activities, these will not be migrated to the centralised notifications system. You will need to recreate these using the new system, more guidance for which can be found on the Using centralised notifications page.