We worked for years with the User Import Script based on the great work of Werner Randelshofer and Peter Hofer from HS Luzern. In this time a lot of new features have been added to the script, which I would like to share and introduce.
 
Minor Tweaks:

• Many changes were made with the user interface, such as:
  • added detailed comments to almost every headline
  • added data validation (drop downs) to many cells
  • added conditional formatting (columns: Action, Password)
  • added some formulas
    • Login: a clean login is automatically created (no whitespaces or special characters)
    • Password: only needed when inserting a new user (password might be unintentionally changed otherwise) and the length of the password and number of digits can be set (password(8;3) creates a random password of 8 characters and 3 of them are digits, e.g. “Zfi48RF9”
  • added new columns
    • Category (Ref-ID): A Ref_ID of a category (also called: “TimeLimitOwner”) can be added here. This is used for Local User Administration in categories.
    • UDF: The values for the Custom User Data Fields can now be imported (see changes in new table “User-Declaration”)
  • New icon, button and styles
• Export file name is set to “[date today]_UserImport.xml”

Major Changes:

• Table “User-Declaration” is added
  • Columns “Excel” and “XML” are used to have a mapping of headlines in table “Users” to the necessary XML-fields. Now all headlines in “Users” can be renamed as desired (just don’t delete or add new columns, else you would need to make this adjustments also in “User-Declaration”)
  • Column “Mandatory field” does help you to set some fields as mandatory. Otherwise the respective error message will not let you export the XML
  • Column “Language Selection” is used for data validation in column “Language”
• Table “MD5-Declaration” is added
  • If MD5 is set to “yes”, the password in XML and ILIAS is MD5 encrypted (= more secure)
  • If MD5 is set to “no”, the password in XML and ILIAS is not encrypted and the ILIAS feature to send an email with password for new users can be used. (For more security use the ILIAS feature to change password on first login)

We hope the changes we made are helpfull and will continue to work on it.
Besides new features we will also introduce new versions of the sheet with support for 64-bit MSOffice (64-bit Windows is not an issue) and with support for MSOffice Mac.

We appreciate your feedback, so leave your comments or ask us anything you like.