[Building Sakai] Contact all users in Sakai

[Daniel Lind]

Thanks Steve!

Then I can conclude that we have three different account types on that 
server: guests, internals and externals. I guess the guest classifies as 
an internal account, though. Unfortunately not all users are in the LDAP 
so we have to check the internal accounts as well.

Du you know the name of the tool for contacting all users from the webb 
interface of Sakai? is it a contrib? It would be really great to have 
that functionality on the Sakai in production! I'm sure we will come to 
situations where we have to contact at least all site owners and it 
would be great if we could do it from the web interface.


Regards,
Daniel Lind

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Daniel Lind
UMDAC, Umeå universitet
901 87 Umeå Telefon: +46 90 786 53 12
Daniel.Lind at umdac.umu.se
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Steve Swinsburg skrev:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> There should not be email addresses in the SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP table but 
> if user accounts were created with the userId as the eid (ie Guest user 
> accounts from Site Info > Add Participants), then it may appear that 
> way. Those accounts will also have the email listed in the SAKAI_USER 
> table for each user though, so you can rule out SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP being 
> a source.
> 
> The SAKAI_PERSON_T table backs a user's Profile, and there is no 
> guarantee they have filled it out. So that discounts that source as well.
> 
> The only real source is the SAKAI_USER table and would be the one I 
> would use. However, being run over LDAP introduces another issue. You 
> say that some appear in there and some don't. My bet is that at some 
> point in time, accounts were created in Sakai as well as LDAP or the 
> LDAP configuration flag to create accounts in Sakai based on those in 
> LDAP was turned on. If they are no longer being synchronised then that 
> configuration may have changed. FYI I leave this turned off so only the 
> SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP table is populated which links a username from LDAP 
> (jsmith26) to an internal account in Sakai 
> (5fef7a2b-aca6-4c5b-8bd9-ef82ce9a71c4).
> 
> And yes, email addresses are looked up in the fly from LDAP if you have 
> it configured that way.
> 
> If you can reliably say that all users are in LDAP only, then I'd just 
> run a query against LDAP to find all users you need to contact. Most 
> LDAP schema's have a field for email, it's generally their official 
> email address for an institution so depending on your local policy 
> students might not be kept up to date (ie a user might only check their 
> Hotmail address, not their official university one)
> 
> Note also you could use the web services for this (retrieving user email 
> addresses).
> 
> As for how I contact users, MOTD puts a message in their user's My 
> Workspace which is prominently displayed. There is a function for email 
> notification but I have never found that to work. Think I remember 
> seeing a Jira about it not doing a lot.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> 
> cheers,
> Steve
> 
> ---
> Steve Swinsburg
> Portal Systems Developer
> Centre for e-Science
> Lancaster University
> Lancaster
> LA1 4YT
> 
> email: s.swinsburg at lancaster.ac.uk
> phone: +44 (0) 1524 594870