The standard Course Invitation email does not work for SSO/SAML users

[DamianJolly]

I'm a very news Canvas user and admin.

We have a combination of external students and internal employees who are required to interact with Canvas LMS as a student.

We use SSO/SAML to log employes into Canvas.

When we enrol employees into Canvas, they get an automated Course Invitation email with an incorrect link. If they are not currently logged into Canvas, the link they are sent takes them to a standard email login page instead of the https://xxxxxx.instructure.com/login/saml login. Users get confused because they don't know their password, (they don't have one), and waste a lot of time trying to reset a password and generally getting cranky.

Is it possible to change the Course Invite, or prevent it from being sent?

Thanks

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

@DamianJolly Welcome to the community and welcome to being a Canvas Admin!

Bad news: You can't change the link on the automated invite emails. Those are system generated. You can prevent the invite from getting sent if you use the API or use a SIS import to enroll the users into the course. However, this is more advanced and doesn't actually solve the issue of users getting directed to the wrong login portals.

Good news: Because you have two seperate login portals (SSO and then the standard /login/canvas portal), you can set up something that is called a discovery page. This discovery page allows for users that are not logged in to be directed a page with the login portals, which once the user clicks on the correct one, will continue the login process for the user. 

A discovery page can be housed anywhere -- so for example, my district houses theirs on the district webpage. And it's as simple as directing people to the correct login through buttons, links, etc.

The link above will help with setting up a discovery page. Hope this helps!