Richard Willis – SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner

Inspired by a discussion on Edugeek I’ve quickly knocked up a quick utility to check the format of email addresses in a csv file. You can download it from here.

This utility will iterate through an input file and check the validity of email addresses. Each line of the input file must be of the format identifier,email address. The identifier is used in the output message, and the email is of course checked.

Example input file

002345,info@salamandersoft.co.uk
002346,me@domain.com
002347,do not email
    

The utility will pick up the 3rd line as an invalid email address and output

POSSIBLY INVALID:002347:do not email

Internally it uses a regular expression to check the email. This is not perfect and will give false positives when compared to RFC 2822, but it is good enough for most purposes.

The regular expression used is: ^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$

To use:

1. Run CheckEmails.exe inputFile
2. inputFile is the relative of absolute path to the csv file

So to use to check your email addresses in Sims, first create a report which contains their Admission Number and email which saves to csv. The run the report and the use the resulting file as input to CheckEmails.

You can run CheckEmails.exe /? for a brief help summary.

I have just created another free utility for Sims – a utility to export details of all reports in Sims into a csv file. That’s reports as in the reporting engine, not student reports. This will allow you to easily see what reports are in Sims, who created them and hence whether you want to remove any. Inspired by this thread on EduGeek.

To use:

1. The utility must be run on a machine where Sims.net workstation or server is installed.
2. First run GenerateConfigFile.bat. You must also run this everytime Sims.Net is updated. If Sims.Net is not installed in c:\program files\Sims\Sims .Net, you will need to modify the bat file.
3. Copy a connect.ini into the folder.
4. Run SimsReportList from the command line with 3 arguments, Sims username, Sims password and output folder.
5. SimsReportList will then save the report details into the file.

You can run SimsReportList.exe /? for a brief help summary.

Download Here.

I now have a way to script bulk loading of photos from Sims into SharePoint, for example to enable the use of the Learning Gateway My Children web part.

The script is in 2 parts. First extract the photos from Sims using our free Photo Export tool

PhotoExport.exe simsuser simspassword outputFolder /names:mapping.csv

where mapping.csv is a csv file mapping admission numbers to Active Directory login names

The use the PowerShell script in my last blog entry Using PowerShell to Bulk Upload Files to SharePoint to upload the images to SharePoint.

You could even set up a scheduled task to automatically upload them on a predefined schedule.

I’ve updated the free Sims Photo Extract Utility to have the following extra functionality:

• Choose image format to save as
• Ability to read a csv list of names to save images as. Useful for example if you want to save the images with their network login name – you would just have to provide a csv linking their Admission Number to login name
• Display list of years if an invalid year is passed

Details of how to use these are detailed in the README.txt file and by running PhotoExport /?.

I’ve also fixed a bug where the wrong extension was used in some circumstances.

You can download the updated version from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.

I’ve uploaded a updated version of the free photo export from Sims utility. There are 2 changes:

1. Option to save the photos named as the internal sims ID rather than Admission Number and Staff Code. Run PhotoExport /? for help on how to do this.
2. It now handles the cases where the Staff Code contains characters which are not valid characters for a file name. It replaces these characters with –.

You can download the utility from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.