Symetrik Domino Consulting

I’m sure that most admins have been using text files to generate IDs for a long time.

I haven’t.

I sat down to register 284 users this week. It was a new process to me, so I’m going to go through the list of steps here.

1. Created a new OU – let’s call it WHEAT.
2. Edited the Recovery information for this OU ID.
3. Created a group for all users on this new server cluster.
4. Organized a list of users given by HR to be registered in excel spreadsheet format.
5. Organized the columns according to the Domino help files.

I used the following columns, though there are more you can specify in the help file.
lastname,firstname,middle,,,id file directory,id file name,server,directory,mailfile,location,,,,local administrator,internet address,shortname,,,mail template

6. Exported the Excel file to a .csv to get the comma formatted text above.
7. Edited the .csv file with a text editor, removed the header column line (line 1) and replaced all commas (,) with semi colons (;) as required by the import file format.

8. I went to the server where I was going to register all users, created a replica of the certification log (certlog.nsf) and our Recovery Database (mail\recovery.nsf).

9. I set my administration preferences to use the server where I would register the users, Configuration\Tools\Register\Person.

10. I set the Registration Server, chose advanced, set the Internet address field, set the certificate expiration date to more than 2 years.

NOTE: This step is important, because all of the imported users from the list will inherit anything you set here.

11. Imported the text file.

12. Selected all users in the imported list and chose to create a replica of their mailfile on the cluster mate server in the cluster.

13. Selected all users in the imported list and deselected Create ID file in address book, and selected “create ID file in “location” where the location was already specified in my import file.

I didn’t have to set anything else. I was able to make the short name, ID file, and first part of the Internet address all the same by specifying each in the import text file.

There were some things that could be set in the import file, some things that needed to be specified after import, and some things that probably could have been set through a registration policy. I didn’t see any real value in setting up a registration policy this time.

All said and done the generation of ids, person documents, and mailboxes is still in progress, but I’m guessing it will last about 2 hours.