Apple School Manager is a portal used to create classes, import students, manage Managed Apple IDs, and link all these things together. You can use a Student Information System (SIS) to create these classes, import students, etc. But, only if you have a SIS with an API that Apple links to. If you don’t, you’ll need to import data using csv files. And you’ll need to import four csv files: Classes, Instructors, Staff, and of course Students.
Many schools will already have this data in Active Directory or another LDAP-based solution. Here, we’ll look at getting the information out of Active Directory and into csv. The LDIFDE utility exports and imports objects from and to Active Directory using the ldif format, which is kinda’ like csv when it gets really drunk and can’t stay on one line. Luckily, ldif can’t drive. Actually, each attribute/field is on a line (which allows for arrays) and an empty line starts the next record. Which can make for a pretty messy looking file the first time you look at one. The csvde command can be used to export data into the csv format instead. In it’s simplest form the ldifde command can be used to export Active Directory objects just using a -f option to specify the location (the working directory that we’re running the ldifde command from if using powershell to do so or remove .\ if using a standard command prompt):
ldifde -f .\ADExport.ldf
This exports all attributes of all objects, which overlap with many in a target Active Directory and so can’t be imported. Therefore, you have to limit the scope of what you’re exporting, which you can do in a few ways. The first is to only export a given OU (in this case called Students, but you could do one for Teachers, one for each grade, etc). To limit, you’ll define a dn with a -d flag followed by the actual dn of the OU you’re exporting and then you’d add a -p for subtree. In the following example we’ll export all of the objects from the sales OU to the StudentsOUExport.ldf file:
ldifde -d "OU=Students,DC=krypted,DC=local" -p subtree -f .\StudentsOUExport.ldf
Once you have the ldif file, you’ll want to convert it from ldif to csv. Some apps to do so:
Once you have the file in csv form, you can import it using the Apple School Manager web interface.