Exercise 7.8: Exporting and importing corporate address book contacts

In this exercise you will learn how to export and import contacts to the corporate address book.

Overview

SmartCloud iNotes® provides the functionality for administrators to export and import corporate address books.

Exporting provides a way for administrators to backup the corporate address book.

Importing provides a way for administrators to quickly populate the corporate address book from a file containing contact information. Users can then access the corporate address book to find other users.

The maximum number of contacts that can be imported into the directory depends on the type of account you have. A paid service account can have up to 500,000 contacts. A trial account can have up to 100,000 contacts if it is using your own domain. A trial account using the default SmartCloud iNotes trial domain can have up to 500 contacts in the address book.

You can only have one corporate address book.

Objectives

In this exercise, you will:

Glossary

Term Definition
.csv file format Comma separated values file format. This type of file is used to store tabular data in which numbers and text are stored in plain-text form that can be easily written and read in a text editor like Notepad.
LDIF file format The LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) is a standard plain text data interchange format for representing LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory content and update requests. LDIF conveys directory content as a set of records, one record for each object (or entry). It represents update requests, such as Add, Modify, Delete, and Rename, as a set of records, one record for each update request.

LDIF is one of the formats for importing and exporting address book data that the address books in Netscape Communicator.
tab-delimited file format A tab-separated values file is a simple text format for a database table. Each record in the table is one line of the text file. Each field value of a record is separated from the next by a tab stop character.
Parent topic: Part B: Managing IBM SmartCloud iNotes contacts
Next topic: Exercise 7.9: Creating distribution lists

Procedure A: Exporting the corporate address book

Step
Action
1
Log in and navigate to the Administration panel. For detailed steps, see the procedure document: Accessing the Administration Panel.
2
Click iNotes > Corporate Directory Manager.
3
Select Comma Separated Values (.csv), and click Export.
screenshot of Export dialog
4
Select Save File and click OK.
screenshot of Save File dialog
5
Name the file addressbook.csv, save as type, csv File and save it to a folder on your hard drive.
Save file as addressbook.csv and type csv file

Procedure B: Importing contacts into the corporate address book

Step
Action
1
Download the following file to a temporary folder on your hard drive: test_addressbook.csv.
2
Login to a SmartCloud iNotes account and click on the People > Contacts tab, then Organization directory. Depending on your current configuration, you may or may not see contacts listed here.
Company directory tab
3
Click Administration > Manage Organization.
4
Click iNotes > Corporate Directory Manager.
5
In the Import section of the administration pane:
  1. Select the file format as Comma Separated Values (.csv)
  2. Click Browse, and select the file you downloaded in Step 1
  3. Click Open
  4. Click Import.

    Wait for the import process to complete before moving to the next step. Be aware of the fact that the imported directory overwrites the current corporate address book.

    Import dialog box with Browse and Import buttons highlighted

  5. You should receive a message that the contacts were imported.
6
In the SmartCloud for Social Business user interface, again click on the Contacts tab, then Corporate directory.

Result: at this point, you should now see the following users in the corporate directory:

image of corporate directory with imported users

7
Open the file you downloaded in step 1 in Notepad.

Note that the file must have fields defined at the top of the file and the contact records must conform to the defined fields. For example, if you have a field defined as "Middle Initial" but a given contact does not have a middle initial, provide a null value for that field consisting of empty double quotes.

Example:

"First Name","Middle Initial","Last Name","e-mail address"

image showing the header fields in the corporate directory

8
Close the file.

Troubleshooting

Problem Resolution
After importing a file, I see nothing in the corporate contacts.

Be sure you saved the file with UTF-8 encoding. This screenshot if from Windows Notepad.

image highlighting the UTF-8 encoding button
The values in the corporate contacts are missing.

Be sure that you have a value corresponding to each field that is defined at the top of the import file. If a field value needs to be blank for a given value, include it as a null value.

For example, if the contact does not have a middle initial:

"First Name","Middle Initial","Last Name","e-mail address" "Jane", "", "Doe", "jdoe@company.com"

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