Enhanced Groups Experience: Search, Uploads & Certification Support

Description

This release continues to add highly requested usability enhancements to the redesigned Groups experience in Cornerstone OnDemand, reducing the time it takes to create groups and improving the overall administrator experience. The updates focus on improving transparency during the OU value selection upload process, increasing search precision, and addressing consistent customer feedback across several search usability areas.

The release also closes an important gap by adding full certification support to the new Groups experience. Together, these changes give administrators clearer system visibility and better tools to manage complex group configurations involving large data sets.

Business Need

Administrators frequently manage complex group configurations involving large data sets, and the previous experience had gaps in system feedback, especially during uploads. The single search box in the redesigned UI made it difficult to find specific users or attributes efficiently, particularly in large organizations with common names or complex reporting structures, while attribute searches that evaluated titles and categories simultaneously often returned irrelevant or out-of-order results.

Additionally, certification-based criteria could only be viewed in the new UI, with creation and editing locked to the legacy interface. This disrupted workflows and discouraged full adoption of the redesigned Groups experience. This release directly addresses these pain points by improving UI feedback, search precision, and feature completeness.

Key Features

• A Toast message for OU value selection uploads clearly indicates how many items were not selected, giving administrators immediate insight; the upload mechanism skips inactive OUs or OUs that cannot be found, and instructional text reinforces file requirements such as supported formats, column structure, and selection limits.
• The improved upload members experience disables the close button and X icon while a file is actively uploading, prevents premature exits, displays a Currently Processing Members confirmation message, and adds a navigation option to return directly to the Manage Groups page.
• The Attribute Selector now includes an attribute type filter that lets administrators narrow search results by attribute type, ensuring returned values align more closely with their intended use case for a faster, more predictable selection experience.
• Advanced user search lets administrators toggle between quick search and advanced search modes, revealing individual fields for first name, last name, user ID, username, and manager last name, along with an option to reset all search filters for precise multi-criteria queries.
• Full certification attribute UI support enables administrators to add, update, and manage certification-based criteria directly within the new UI, rather than being limited to viewing them.

Deployment & Considerations

The Groups redesign usability enhancements are available in stage portals at the start of UAT and in production and pilot environments with the July 2026 release. All usability enhancements are on by default in any portal with the Groups redesign activated, and require the Groups redesign to be enabled as a prerequisite.

Administrators should note a known consideration: in the current UI design framework, the toast notification appears in the top-left corner on a dark background combined with a flyout component. The product team is aware that this placement and visual combination may not provide the best experience and expects a broader, consistent solution to be delivered at the Flare design system level rather than as a Groups-specific change.