Import people into Converia

The Importer allows you to import a large number of personal data records with different roles (reviewers, participants or members) from external systems into Converia. This personal data is then available in the system for mailings, badge printing, check-in or for rating contributions, for example.

This chapter describes the general import of personal data.

Preparation of the import data in Excel

To ensure that the importer can process the data correctly, it is necessary to follow the specifications of this import template exactly. The CSV template file can be opened and edited as usual in Microsoft Excel. The two sample data sets can be removed.

Leave empty the columns for which there are no values (do not delete or reorder these columns).

The mandatory information for the data records to be imported is:

• Surname (Last Name column)

• Country (Country column) – Use the ISO codes (ISO 3166-2 alpha-2 code list, second column in this Wikipedia list).

• E-mail address (E-mail column) – If the e-mail address is invalid, the personal record will not be imported.

• Language (column L Lang) – Use the language codes DE, EN or FR (only languages that are active for this conference can be used).

Person data records

Personal data sets can be imported with or without a Converia account.

Import person with account

A data record can be imported with an account by entering a user name (column E User name). The data subjects should be informed that an account already exists for them. Otherwise, there is a risk that the persons will create another account, thereby creating duplicates.

Import person without account

A record can be imported without an account by leaving the E column empty. Affected persons should then be able to define their own password and username by clicking on an activation link that can be sent by email, thus activating the Converia account for the imported personal record. Without this activation via link, a duplicate will be created each time the person logs in at the frontend.

Change the encoding to UTF-8

To ensure that special characters and umlauts are imported correctly, it is necessary to set the encoding of the CSV import file to UTF-8. To do this in Excel, please save the file as “CSV UTF-8 (separated by commas) (*.csv)”.

Importing data into Converia

• Show preview (no import will be carried out at this point).

• The following error messages may appear at this step:

  • Invalid email address. > Check the email address in the line indicated. The problem may be a space before or after the email address.

  • Invalid country code. This must correspond to the ISO code. > Check the country code in the line indicated.

  • An inactive language is to be imported. > Change the language in the given line.

  • Wrong number of columns, use the template. > Deleting, moving or adding columns causes this error message.

• Check whether all data records are displayed correctly. Particular attention should be paid to umlauts and special characters.

  

• If error messages appear or the display of umlauts and special characters is incorrect, the data records in the import template must be corrected and the conversion to UTF-8 repeated.

• All data records can be checked individually by clicking on Next data record example below (no import will take place yet).

The Start import button only appears under the data records when there are no more error messages.

Subsequently, a log is created of how the import went.