If your organisation issues certificates, this platform offers numerous features to facilitate the process, including the management of recipients and collection of useful data.
Certificates are issued from certification schemes, so you'll need to set one of these up first if you haven't already.
It is possible to issue test certificates to check the settings of your scheme.
On the 'issue certificate to individual and 'issue certificate to organisation' buttons, there are options to issue a test certificate. These get sent to yourself or your own organisation respectively, and the issuing process populates the name by default with 'Test Recipient'. However, you can enter an alternative name (which would likely result in a name-mismatch being highlighted) and you can eneter other dummy information as you see fit or require based on your scheme. Once issued, they will appear on your received certificate page (either your personal one or your own organisation's one, depending on the certificate issued). You can then view them and check them.
The test certificates are marked with a demo (test) icon. They are grouped in your demo/test certificates folder on your issued certificates page. They do not incur a charge to issue and they can be deleted by you afterwards via the respective actions menu on your issued certificates page or on the digital certificate page. Test certificates mimic real certificates in other ways (such as visibility, expiry, use of smart badges, etc) so that you can test different features depending on your scheme's settings.
Currently, you can't issue test certificates to things, but we'll be adding this feature soon.
Test certificates are included in the analytics data so that that you can see them working and contributing to the appropriate datasets and graphs. When you delete a test certificate, the data will no longer be included. Therefore, it is recommended that you delete your test certificates before using the analytics data for reports about official certificates, etc.
We also delete test certificates from time-to-time to reduce unnecessary load on the system and for general housekeeping. Typically, we delete test certificates that are over one month old.
Test certificates can also be issued by the API using the "is_test" flag. In such cases, the certificate is emailed to the technical contact provided in your organisation settings. If no techincal contact has been entered, the email will be addressed to the organisation owner.
You can issue certificates manually by pressing the 'issue certificate to individual', 'issue certificate to organisation' or 'issue certificate to thing' on the appropriate scheme. Note that options may be greyed out depending on the scheme settings.
This process then takes you through a manual issuing wizard.
If your certification scheme has been approved by us, manually issuing to an organisation will bring up known suggested options if an email address has already been linked to an organisation. This feature helps reduce errors and time by autocompleting the organisation name, country, type and number.
If your certification scheme has been approved by us, manually issuing to an individual will auto-fill their first name and last name if an email address has already been linked to a user and they have agreed to this autofill function. This feature helps reduce name mismatches and time to issue a certificate.
You can issue certificates in bulk from a csv file.
You can issue certificates automatically from an API request. You can review the API schema in 'API Information' in the Organisation Settings menu. We'll provide more details here soon, but in the meantime we can help you with this integration, so please just get in touch.
Once you have issued certificates, you can see a list on the Issued Certificates page. These can be viewed as cards or in a table format.
The search box can help you narrow down the list of issued certificates based on the name they were issued to. You can search on a phrase by placing the "words in quotes". To search on the name (email) of the issuer within your organisation, tick the box for 'advanced search'.