Before we dive into how I actually built Mobileye's new system, we need to take a quick detour.
If you are coming from a legacy LMS (like Blossom, or older versions of Cornerstone), you are probably used to a "file cabinet" architecture. You have a folder, inside it a sub-folder, and inside that, a course. If you want someone to see it, you give them access to the folder.
Docebo doesn't work like that. It uses a decoupled, highly dynamic architecture. It can be confusing at first, but once it clicks, you realize it's the secret to creating a deeply personalized, Netflix-style experience for 10,000 employees without doing any daily maintenance.
Let's break down the building blocks in plain English.
The Inventory: Courses
Think of Courses as the actual products in a warehouse. A course contains your training materials (videos, SCORM files, quizzes). But here is the catch: just because a course exists in the warehouse doesn't mean anyone can see it. It has no visibility on its own.
The Permissions Engine: Catalogs vs. Channels
To get a product out of the warehouse and in front of a user, you need to put it on a shelf. In Docebo, you have two very different types of shelves.
1. Catalogs (The Formal Shelves):
Catalogs are strictly about permissions. They dictate who is legally allowed to pull a course off the shelf. If I create a "Cybersecurity Basics" catalog, I can set a rule that says: Only employees in the R&D branch can see this catalog. If a Sales rep searches for a course inside that catalog, the system will pretend it doesn't exist. Catalogs are your security guards.
2. Channels (The Netflix Rows):
If Catalogs are about permissions, Channels are about discovery. Think of the horizontal rows you scroll through on Netflix ("Trending Now," "Because you watched X"). Channels group courses by topic or skill. Furthermore, users can follow Channels, and experts can upload their own assets directly to them. It creates an organic, browsing-based learning experience.
The Storefront: Pages and Menus
Now that we have products (Courses) on shelves with security guards (Catalogs) and discovery rows (Channels), we need to build the actual store the user walks into.
Pages are your blank canvases. Using drag-and-drop widgets, you design the layout. You can drop a widget that displays Catalogs, another widget that shows the user's active enrollments, and a banner at the top.
Menus are the front doors that lead users to these pages.
The Magic: Zero Maintenance Personalization
Here is where the architecture becomes brilliant. You don't need to build 50 different homepages for 50 different departments. You can build just ONE massive homepage for the whole company.
Because of how permissions work in Catalogs and Channels, the page acts like a chameleon. The widgets on the page automatically filter their content based on who is looking at them.
Let's say a new engineer and a salesperson both log in and look at the exact same "Company Homepage".
There is a "Catalogs" widget on that page. The engineer looks at it and sees the "Technical Skills Catalog," because the HRIS system placed her in the R&D branch. The salesperson looks at the exact same widget on the exact same page, but he sees the "Q3 Product Updates Catalog."
The beauty of this? I, as the admin, do exactly nothing when someone gets hired, promoted, or moves departments. I build one beautiful page, and I set up the catalog logic once. The HRIS updates their branch, and Docebo instantly and completely redraws the content they see inside the widgets.
With this architecture understood, we were ready to completely transform how Mobileye's employees consumed knowledge. That is exactly what we started building next.