Acknowledgement & training reminders

In one sentence

When a controlled document is approved or a course is distributed, the recipients get an email immediately — and a per-artifact reminder cadence decides whether (and how often) follow-up emails fire on the days after, ending at a hard stop that's logged on the audit trail.

Three things to remember

One cadence per artifact. Each document version, internal course, and external course carries its own reminder schedule — picked at submit / create time. Different artifacts can run on different cadences in parallel.
Existing artifacts default to no reminders. When the cadence column was added, every pre-existing document and course was set to No reminders so the launch didn't flood users with mail. Opt in per-artifact by editing.
The series ends on the hard-stop day. Each cadence has a defined end. When the cron reaches it, a reminder_series_exhausted entry is written to the artifact's audit trail and no further emails fire — even if the user still hasn't acknowledged.

The six cadence presets

The picker is the same wherever it appears. Pick the one that matches how urgent the obligation is.

Cadence	What fires	When to use
No reminders	Initial email only.	Low-priority informational updates — a typo fix, a minor cosmetic revision, anything where the original distribution is enough.
Daily for 7 days	Initial + a reminder every day on days 1 through 7. Hard stop at day 7.	Urgent updates with a hard deadline a week out.
Daily for 14 days	Initial + a daily reminder for two weeks. Hard stop at day 14.	High-priority training that absolutely must land — regulatory deadlines, safety-critical procedure changes.
Weekly for 4 weeks (default)	Initial + reminder on days 7, 14, 21, 28. Hard stop at day 28.	The everyday default. Works for most routine revisions and routine course assignments.
Daily for 3 days, then weekly for 4 weeks	Initial + days 1, 2, 3 (the aggressive opener) + days 10, 17, 24, 31. Hard stop at day 31.	Hybrid: drive completion in the first week, then back off.
Weekly for 8 weeks	Initial + reminder weekly through day 56. Hard stop at day 56.	Use sparingly — extended series wear thin. Reserve for slow rollouts where two months is a realistic completion window.

The defaults are deliberate. Weekly for 4 weeks is what new artifacts get unless you change it; No reminders is what existing pre-launch artifacts have until an admin opts them in.

Where the picker lives

Three places, all using the same control:

Documents. On the submit-for-approval modal, alongside the ack-mode selector. The picker is only relevant when the version's ack mode is set to acknowledge changes or quiz — if ack mode is none, no email goes out at all, so the cadence is moot.
Internal courses. In the course editor at Admin → Training → Courses → [course], next to the retrain-interval field.
External courses. In the create / edit form at Admin → Training → External Courses, on the same page as the activity ID and distribution list.

In all three places, the cadence's description renders inline below the dropdown so admins can see what they're picking without consulting a separate cheat sheet.

Who gets the emails

The distribution list is expanded recursively at send time:

A named user on the list gets the email directly.
A role on the list expands to every user holding that role (base role or additional role).
A group on the list expands to every member of the group.

Read-and-acknowledge users are included in this expansion just like full users — they can take internal courses, complete external course distributions, and acknowledge documents, so they receive the email when the artifact targets them. See Read & Acknowledge users for the broader R&A capability picture.

The list updates as the org changes. If a new user joins a group that's already on a distribution list, or an existing user is granted a role that's on the list, that user inherits the obligation and gets an email at the moment of the role / group change — they don't have to wait for the next reminder day to come around.

How the daily cron works

A scheduled job runs once a day. For every open obligation (a user has been emailed but hasn't yet acknowledged or completed), the cron:

Computes how many days have passed since the initial send.
Looks up the artifact's cadence presets.
If today's day-offset is in the cadence's reminderDays list, fires another email.
If today's day-offset is past the cadence's hardStopDay, ends the series — writes a reminder_series_exhausted entry to the artifact's History tab and stops scheduling that user.
Completing the obligation (acknowledging the doc, finishing the course) ends the series for that user immediately — no more reminders, regardless of where the cadence is.

The cron is conservative about double-sends: if it's already recorded sending a reminder for a given user-artifact-day, it won't send again.

Reading the audit trail

Two surfaces capture the trail:

The artifact's History tab. Every reminder send is recorded as an activity entry — actor system, timestamp, recipient. When the series ends without completion, the reminder_series_exhausted entry lands here too, so an inspector reading the document's lifecycle can see "distribution mailed Jan 4, reminders fired through Feb 1, series exhausted with 4 users still un-acknowledged."
The user's own Training Hub still shows the obligation as outstanding after the series ends. The emails stop; the dashboard pending row doesn't.

For an inspector asking "prove the org tried to reach the operators who didn't acknowledge," the history tab is the answer.

What this doesn't do

It doesn't punish non-completion. When the series exhausts, no user is locked out, demoted, or flagged — the obligation stays open on their hub indefinitely. Enforcement (if any) is a manager's job, not an automated escalation.
It doesn't escalate beyond the recipient. A reminder goes to the user with the obligation, never to their manager, the document owner, or the admin. If you want supervisor visibility, the Training reporting dashboard surfaces overdue rates at the role / group level.
It doesn't double-send across cadences. A user assigned the same document under two cadences (e.g. via two different groups) gets one initial email and reminders against the longer of the two cadences — the system de-duplicates per user-artifact.

Cadence-picking guidance

Quick rules of thumb:

Routine revision, no deadline? Weekly for 4 weeks. The default exists for this case.
Hard regulatory deadline within a week? Daily for 7 days.
New policy, want it widely read but no emergency? Daily for 3 then weekly for 4.
Org-wide quality-policy rollout to 1,000+ users? Weekly for 8 weeks. The longer window gives ops time to chase stragglers without the cron carrying the whole load.
Cosmetic / spelling / minor fix? No reminders. The initial email is enough.

Document training — where document acknowledgements come from
Internal courses — where the cadence picker sits on the course editor
External training — same picker on the external course form
Training hub — the user's view of pending obligations
Record history — where reminder activity and series-exhausted entries land
Read & Acknowledge users — first-class recipients of these emails