Scenario

As an admin or site owner, you want to automate the process of assigning people to some of your content items (for example, an onboarding track), so that you don't have to perform these assignments manually.

Solution

Set up automated rules to manage content assignments, following these steps:

Read PlusPlus 101: Create automated rules for repetitive workflows to understand how automated rules work.
Create People dashboard segments to define the people you want to assign content to.
Create automated rules, using either Assign a content item as the rule's action.
Select the Content Item you want to assign to those who meet the rule's condition.
Select an Assigner for the content item.
The person you select appears as the assigner in PlusPlus and in the invitation email for the assigned content.
Optionally, set a Time to complete.
By default, time to complete the assignment is the same as what is defined on the content item itself. Alternatively, you can select a number of days in which the assignment should be completed.
Click Publish.
The rule runs on a nightly basis, evaluating the People Segment and assigning those who meet the condition to the selected content item.

Go deeper

Assignable content

The Assign a content item action assigns everyone in the condition's People Segment to the content item you select. Content items you can assign include tracks, event types (soon to be called event series), articles, videos, courses, and codelabs.

Assigning event types v. enrolling in events

Note that the Assign a content item action does not enroll anyone into an event, it can only assign them to an event type, after which they can enroll themselves into a scheduled event of that type. To enroll people into events with automated rules, use the Enroll into all upcoming events of a track or the Enroll to an upcoming event of an event type actions.

How rules handle duplicate assignments

Rather than duplicating an assignment action if conditions are met in consecutive runs of a rule, the system ignores the met condition. For example, if on a Monday, a new engineering hire meets the condition of a rule and is assigned to an onboarding track as result, the new engineer will not be assigned the same track when the rule runs on Tuesday, even if they meet the conditions of the rule.

Do automated rules reassign content?

Rules check for people who have outstanding assignments (not started or in progress) to the content and who have dropped, completed, or been exempted from a content assignment and do not reassign content to them. Rules can reassign content assignments that have reached their expiration date.

Other actions

In addition to content assignments, with automated rules you can automate event enrollment, group management, and (coming soon) badge assignments.