Multiple columns in a MUT CSV?

cgalik
Contributor

Is there a way to have multiple columns in a MUT CSV? I am currently creating separate CSVs for Serial / Device Name and for Serial / Username. If I could do both in one CSV, I think that would save me some time. It might even solve another issue by letting me have a CSV for Serial / Device Name / Username / Building / Room.

4 REPLIES 4

mlev
Contributor

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

Short answer: it's not currently possible. Longer answer: this is actually one of the key features that I would like to include in The MUT v4, and I would love to hear how you'd like it to look.

There are really two primary reasons this doesn't exist yet. The first is simply: the code gets a lot more complex. This is really just an engineering issue, and I can handle it over time. The second reason is: I have no idea what the UX should look like, or how to make it user-friendly, yet powerful.

Ideally, I'd like to allow folks to update quite a few fields at once. For example, they could fill out their usernames to be essentially ldap levels of verbose with full name, phone number, email address, building, department, etc. all at once. But what would the UX look like to make that happen? And how do I prevent users from accidentally putting email address in their phone number field or vice versa? The worst possible scenario I could see would be something like folks overwriting their usernames accidentally, and causing all sorts of configs/policies/apps/restrictions to either scope or unscope in ways that they shouldn't. And there's no "undo" button.

A few ideas I have:
1) You fill out some dropdowns on what you want, and it spits out a CSV "template", but that involves a lot of copy and paste to try to populate that CSV template with your data.

2) Attempt to parse the information out of the header row, but that requires every single MUT user to format their CSV similarly, and to use the exact same values in the header row, and presents all sorts of complications between things like "user name" "User Name", "Username" "User_Name" etc.

3) Perhaps just let you "queue" up multiple updates, so it will go through one sheet (updating for example Asset Tags) and then move on to the next sheet and update the next attribute (like username or whatever). But that presents all the same issues with people overwriting the wrong attribute, and also takes a long time for runs to complete, and generates a massive amount of API calls.

So, I'm not really sure how it would work, and I would LOVE to hear how you (and other MUT users) would like to see it happen.

Edited for clarity

christina_luis
Contributor

I would LOVE something like this. I work for a school we have 4 sites, TK-8 (so 10 grades) and I have to have 4 files for each grade level. Thats a lot of files. Plus hoping I saved them right and got the info correct. If I could have it all in one file like this:
Serial #1 Device Name #2 Asset Tag #3 Extension Attribute (We have Teacher Name added) #4

Does that make sense? Or a Queue would be cool too :) I like the layout of the current MUT I have to say a BIG THANK YOU! because it has saved us sooooo much time.

cgalik
Contributor

Hmm. I think that having common column names would be the way to go. Is it really that big a deal for people to format their column headers the same? Combine that with your first option, the template generator, and I'm sure people that use the multiple-update feature regularly would get the hang of it pretty quickly, to the point that they wouldn't even need the template... they would just put the appropriate column headers on to begin with.

If your pre-flight check verified that the correct headers were in place for the selected attributes, that would certainly help to prevent any erroneous updates.

mlev
Contributor

@cgalik @christina_luis I created a new discussion for this located here: https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/25744/mut-v4-ux-features-discussion Feel free to chime in.