Apple School Manager importing new students

tsossong
New Contributor III

Hi all,

so we started using school manager with two grades - 60 iPads in total. We imported Grade 3 students to schoolmanager and set them all up kind and nicely. So now we come to the point to import Grade 4 students too. In the official documentation I cant find a peace about who to add new students via csv-upload. What will happen if we just upload the csv with the new students. Will Grade 3 stay or will it be overwritten by the new import? Do we have to upload a csv file with all students at once (Grade 3 and Grade 4) and will it ignore the Grade 3 students than because they are already in school manager?

I would appreciate any help.

1 REPLY 1

cpdecker
Contributor III

@tsossong , hopefully my limited experience (and memory) is helpful.

I think this is what happens. Students a, b and c are in ASM as a result of SFTP/CSV upload. If the SFTP connection is broken and reinitiated to force an upload at a particular time, the accounts are converted to "manual" accounts, unless they are included in the next CSV upload as well, in which case they will be turned right back into SFTP accounts when you do that import.

My understanding of manual accounts--they are not affected by CSV uploads unless their unique ID # is the same. They can be edited/deactivated etc. through the ASM web GUI, and will be unaffected by being omitted from SFTP/CSV upload.

If you leave the SFTP connection in place, with same credentials, (I guess it runs every 24 hours on its own?) and just change the CSV data, students a, b and c will be converted to "Inactive" managed AppleIDs if they are not included in the subsequent CSVs. After 30 days, inactive accounts should be deleted automatically by ASM.

So the proper way for handling this, to add students and keep all previous accounts active, should be to upload a CSV which contains students x, y and z in addition to a, b, and c. All accounts that you want to remain active as well as any new accounts need to be included in the most recent CSV.

I think at worst, any omitted data in the CSV would cause your accounts to be flagged as "inactive", not deleted outright. That has been my experience so far.

Hope this helps!