Spiceworks - AD Email Import & LDAP Filter

[Arreks]

So I'm faced with quite the tricky scenario regarding a new setup of Spiceworks as a helpdesk (only) in a School environment, it's set up to sync with AD (read only).

 

The first problem is that the school does not keep any e-mail addresses of users in AD, it's all stored via LGFL Mail so they've never had to worry about it. Now, we need Spiceworks to email the Staff with ticket updates and the only way to do this would be to have email addresses added to the Staff Accounts in AD..

 

The other problem is that Spiceworks is syncing all the student users etc and other accounts we don't want. We only need Staff accounts to be synced.

 

My proposed solution as of yet is:

 

- Grab all email addresses/LGFL usernames from LGFL and then write some scripts or excel formulas to 'generate' the usernames (then quickly check manually that the output is correct)

 

- Use a PowerShell/equivalent script to import emails to AD using username as reference.

 

- Somehow write an LDAP filter to only allow users within a certain group or DN so only Staff users are synced.

 

Does what I'm doing sound correct? is there an easier way to do all of the above? should I throw in the towel and give up?

[Phoenix_IT]

Hmmmmmm, an issue I have seen many schools look at, and normally ends up with writing a number of different scripts in order to achieve the end goal.

 

One school I consult for from time to time, was in a similar position, however they also had another tool called 'AD-Sync' or something like this, that sync's all your USO's to your local AD, as the usernames the school use are therefore exactly the same as the Staff Mail Accounts, I simply wrote a script that once a day added the email address field by parsing the username and appending @lgflmail.org to it, as this is the underlying account name in StaffMail (means you don't need to work out the Alias the mailbox has).

 

Of course if you don't have anything like this, you may need to create a match up of local username and StaffMail email address in a CSV file which you maintain manually, and then run a script that updates based on that each night.

 

Hope this helps