Active Directory Bulk Update

[dcronber]

With Unity and Call Manager leveraging AD in their own ways we have a common problem. Bulk add and delete of data for CallManager users as well as Unity etc.. Perhaps it would be handy to have all AD data managed from a single utility for Unity/CCM and the IPCC suite that uses CCM schema. It would be a convienient tool for customers. EVVBU has no tool or plans to create one. What is needed is to parse the CCM BAT tool spread sheet that users create to add or modify users in bulk on CCM and use that data to do the necessary updates in AD for Unity and CCM. I think you get the idea. What are your thoughts.

[lindborg]

I'm not familiar with the BAT tool myself but I'm assuming it does updates/adds off of a CSV file? If so it'd be a pretty easy to generate a mapping for the different columns names and the like for one of the existing import tools to do adds/updates of Unity subscribers. If there's a page that has details on the BAT tool, post it here and I'll take a look.

If you're looking for something a little different than that, let me know.

[dcronber]

THe URL to start from is:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/sw_ap_to/admin/index.htm

We are in sync.

[lindborg]

Seems doable, although I'm not entirely sure on the mappings for some of the columns (i.e. it looks like the extension number is in a seperate file from the user information which might be tricky).

What about just connecting directly to the CM SQL database and slurping the user/extension information in from there directly? In that case you'd create your users/phone devices and get it all flying and then pop over to a tool to read that information out directly and create subscribers (and optionally directory and message store accounts on the fly) using that data? The rights might be tricky (i.e. the account you log in with has to have read/write access to the local UnityDB SQL database and read access to the CM SQL database on a remote machine) but outside of that it should be doable I'd think. Seems like it'd be a lot slicker than carting around some CSV files...

I'd have to stumble around in the CM SQL database a bit, I haven't spent any time rummaging around in there. I'm assuming folks normally setup phones/users in CM before they create subscribers in Unity so this seems like the proper data direction. If we could settle on a proper unique identifier for a user (ID or Extension I'd imagine) it could even be expanded to updates for existing subscribers based on changes in CM.

I prefer the idea of connecting right to SQL since as I understand it not every site uses the AD extensions for CM... I've been meaning to look into such a tool for a while anyway, it's just been so busy with the 3.1(5) and 4.0(1) work my team hasn't had any cycles to investigate such things. With 3.1(5) hitting the streets in a couple weeks I might have some time to look into this. I'll ping some folks in the CM group and see what they think of this...

[dcronber]

With CCM there is no user data in SQL. The directory number of the phone is tied to the MAC address of the phone in the form "SEPnnnnnnnnnnn.cfg" Then in the directory there is a user attribute that points to an OU that is the name of the cluster. In that OU is the user profile that contains the attributes of the users phone. So SQL knows all about the phone and the directory knows all about the user. So there is no way to just use SQL. Thus the problem we have.

[lindborg]

yeah... had a few folks chime in via email on this one. Since the directory can be one of three choices it would make it really difficult to dance with all three to make this type of dynamic link fly.

so... I guess chunking in the CSV files would be as good as it gets here...