Business Unit Import

The import of groups, position and user data is crucial for managing organisational structures. Based on the fact that mass data is to be updated regularly, e.g. once a week, a manual update would not be practicable for bigger organisations.

The import needs to be configured in the Configuration Manager.

Basic Priciple

Groups contain users and positions, positions contain users. Therefore the whole organisational structure import process should be scheduled in the following way:

User import (existing) > Position import (new) → Group import (new) This order will minimize the number of invalid object assignments.

This depends on job configuration and is no task for implementation.

The xml structure is defined by imc as a standard structure. The customers are in charge of creating a valid xml file. 

The import is triggered by a job. On GUI it can be triggered besides this job manually. This can be done separately for positions and groups. 

The import starts with loading the current xml file and validating it. If the validation is OK, the database update starts. 

Group Import

The main purpose of the group import concerning talent management is to create or update an organisational structure. New groups should be created on import, existing ones should be updated. The update includes relocations and deletions within the group structure. 

The new group import will not substitute the existing LDAP import. It supports org unit and standard group import but is not enhanced in functional scope. 

imc Learning Suite will expect an XML file to process its data into the existing org structure. The generation of this xml file will be done by the customers.

Via businessprocess configuration a folder can be defined where imc Learning Suite expects the latest xml files. 

The import expects always an xml file with the whole structure of a defined main group. Groups, which are not integrated into the xml file, will be removed from DB. 

All attributes and their values included in the xml-file are imported. This means, when the values are changed in imc Learning Suite, the next import will overwrite these changes.

When attributes should be read-only in imc Learning Suite, they have to be included in the businessprocess configuration to make the corresponding field in imc Learning Suite read-only.

Import Specifications

• The import will ignore if an imported object is locked in the LMS, because edited by another user. There will be a mechanism which will forbid the user to save his changes.

• The import will be restricted to one main group by configuration. If a customer wants to import several main groups he has to configure separate imports for this.

• The main group folder must be created manually in the LMS. When it is updated by import the first time it receives an external ID and can no longer be administered like a not-imported object.

• It can be specified if the import of an empty field will ignore or delete an existing entry.

• If groups are created, the clearances of the direct parent group are written to the new group. If not possible: write standard ACL rights.

• If a group is deleted in source system, the corresponding group is also deleted in imc Learning Suite after the import of the updated xml-file. Child groups of the deleted groups should also be deleted in DB if not moved to another parent based on the structure update. Remark: No influence on reporting, because data from the past come from history table copies.

• If the creator of a new group (creator by configuration) is not allowed to create groups on GUI, no special action is to be performed. The group will be created with him as creator.

• Group attribute fields can contain HTML strings. The import exchange format (xml) must handle this correctly.

• Note for later functional specifications: Depending on data history mechanism it should be avoided that each import update causes a history table entry, even if there is nothing changed for the group.

Validation Steps

For the case the xml file might not contain valid data, it must be avoided that imc Learning Suite starts import into DB without prior check. Otherwise it could be possible that parts of the structure will be updated and others will not because the update was cancelled. This could lead to massive data inconsistencies.

Therefore, when imc Learning Suite receives an xml file, the following validations are necessary:

Table 1: Pre-validation for group import