4me | Bulk Import of People

When you need to provision people from a directory service you will probably use the out-of-the box SCIM provisioning service. This integration is available for the most well-known Identity Providers like Azure AD, Google SSO, Okta and OneLogin.

But in some cases the people info may not be available in your Identity Provider system or you need to load the people contact details from another system. In that case you can load this info with the 4me Bulk Import API.

Please read the documentation on the 4me Developer Site carefully to get a good understanding of how the integration with directory services has to be done.

In the following exercise external people that are registered in a CRM application need to be imported in the Widget Data Center account. For this exercise we have prepared two import files:

The people import file contains two person records from the Microsoft organization. The second file contains the contact details for these 2 persons and additional contact details for the already defined person record of Abbie Lindt.

Exercises:

Can you manually execute the Bulk Import API calls to import the person recods and the person contact details in the Widget Data Center (id = wdc) account?

Download the files to your hard drive and copy them to a folder, for example /tmp/it_bulk_import_people.csv. Upload the file with:

curl -X POST -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <personal-token>" -H "X-4me-Account: wdc" -F type=people -F "file=@/tmp/it_bulk_import_people.csv" "https://api.4me-demo.com/v1/import"

Make sure the people upload has finished using the token (something like ‘68ef5ef0…db41e68’) received after the previous call:

curl -X GET -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <personal-token>" -H "X-4me-Account: wdc" "https://api.4me-demo.com/v1/import/68ef5ef0...db41e68"

Then cupload the it_bulk_import_people_contact_details.csv file with:

curl -X POST -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <personal-token>" -H "X-4me-Account: wdc" -F type=people_contact_details -F "file=@/tmp/it_bulk_import_people_contact_details.csv" "https://api.4me-demo.com/v1/import"

Login as Howard Tanner to the Widget Data Center account and check if the person records have been created and if the contact details have been added to the person record of Abbie Lindt.

Questions:

What happened with the contact details that were already defined for Abbie Lindt? Are these erased? Why?

The already existing contact details of Abbie Lindt have been kept. The reason is that these were manually created. The Integration flag on these contact details is set to False (=0).

Can you edit the contact details of Abbie Lindt that have been added by the integration script ? Why?

You cannot edit the contact details of Abbie Lindt that have been added by the integration script. In the import file the value in the Integration column is set to 1 ( Integration = True) which means that this contact is managed by the integration and cannot be modified via the specialist user interface. It also means that when this import is done all existing contact details where the integration flag is true are erased. This allows a directory services integration to remove obsolete contact details by just importing the actual contact details.