Bulk upload feature & network affiliations

[Dan Kaempff]

I met with a potential new network user today - a private Montessori school - to show them the site and discuss how it could assist and benefit them. As a part of the presentation, I discussed the Bulk Upload feature and the question arose that if a sub-network administrator uploads a list of names and email addresses, do the people that register through that upload process automatically get affiliated with the school's network? OR, do they still need to take the additional step of entering a passcode or gaining admin approval?

 

The potential admin was asking the question in the hopes of reducing the number of people they would have to approve. (The passcode or domain name affiliation options are not ones that will work for them.) Any thoughts on this?

 

Thanks,

Dan

[Amol B]

This is an excellent question – thanks for posting on Smart Transportation.

The short answer is yes – when a school administrator does a bulk import – the users are associated with the school network.

• If the account does not exist, then the import process creates a new account and associates the user with the network.
• If there is an existing account in the system (where the email address is a match), the user account is associated with the school network (original information in the system such as the name and phone number of the user is retained).

So yes, if the school imports a list of users, they would not have to approve those users individually nor would the users need to use the passcode mechanism to associate with the school network.

I wanted to take this opportunity to post more about the accounts import process for those looking to take advantage of this capability that is available widely in the system. The account import process is different from the Account and Trips import that is available only for SchoolPool and is not covered under this post.

With the accounts import feature, users are imported with basic information including their name, phone and email. The feature is available from State, Regional, City, County, TMA, Worksite, Employer, Program, University and School networks. When the import is performed through State, Regional, City, County, TMA or Worksite – the import behaves slightly different than when performed through Employer, Program and University. The State, Regional, City, County, TMA and Worksite networks use associations that are geographical (zip code, city, GIS boundary, worksite etc). This information is not available during the import and so association to these network types is not done via the import process. These associations only happen after the user completes the post registration screen that requires the home address and the work address.

When the import is performed through Employer, Program and University networks – the user accounts are associated with the appropriate network (this is true for new accounts and existing accounts that are already in the system). There is one aspect to note - the user accounts are associated with the State network selected at the time of import (the selection is done by the administrator). Another thing to note - the email associated with the account import process that contains the validation link and the temporary password is only sent to users who are newly imported.

[Dan Kaempff]

Great answer, Amol. Thanks for taking the time to be so detailed.

 

Just one follow-up question, then. You stated: "the email associated with the account import process that contains the validation link and the temporary password is only sent to users who are newly imported." It's a little unclear to me still about how you go about associating an existing user with a newly formed network. I didn't see anything in the admin manual that addressed that. Does the administrator need to send them an invitation? Thanks!

[Amol B]

The administrator does not need to send an invitation - there is no separate action required for processing existing accounts.

I'm going to use the SchoolPool example to elaborate on the scenario. Let's say the school administrator has a list of 100 parent accounts with their name, email address and phone. Further, let's assume 20 of those parents have already signed up in the iCarpool-RideshareOnline platform (so they have an existing account in RSO that matches the email address in the parent roster).

The school administrator may not know who is in the system and who is not - this is fine. The school administrator simply uses the list of 100 parent accounts and performs the import. The system sends the import email with the validation link  and temporary password to the 80 new accounts the import process creates. The remaining 20 existing accounts are associated with the school network by the import process as part of the import - there is no additional step required from the administrator. 

If the administrator wants to notify these existing users that now their account is associated with the school network, the administrator could use the import process output - filter the list to the accounts that were existing before - and then send out an email separately (this email would need to be sent external to RSO).

The import tool is powerful to grow the program, I do hope we see increased usage of the tool.