Best practices for using spreadsheets in data management

Permission groups for existing People records

If you must update permission groups for existing People records, use the CTM_LoadPeoplePermissionGroups tab of the People spreadsheet (People.xlsx).

When updating permissions for existing People records, keep the following points in mind:

• Use a new instance of the People spreadsheet. 
• For each person that you are adding to a permission group, provide the person's login ID and the name of the permission groups that you want to add.

Task templates versus process templates

Task template validation process has certain limitations and differing uses of task and process templates. The difference lies in the way you use task templates to load tasks and the associations between their child objects, such as tasks and task groups, versus how you use process templates to load processes and the associations between their child objects, such as tasks and task groups.

Limitations of task template validation

No validation is performed on the automatic fields on the TMS_LoadTaskTemplate tab of the Process Setup-Task.xlsx spreadsheet. However, the automatic command is validated. This behavior corresponds to the same behavior that exists on the TMS:Task Template form.

Differing uses of task and process templates

The system behaves differently when it uploads child tasks and task groups using templates defined in the ProcessSetup-Task.xlsx and Transactional-Task.xlsx spreadsheets. The upload works for each as follows:

• ProcessSetup-Task.xlsx—When you upload data referencing a Task Group Template in the Task Group Template Identifier field on the TMS_LoadTaskGroupTemplate tab, any associated task groups and tasks are also uploaded automatically.
• Transactional-Task.xlsx—When you upload tickets referencing a Task Group Template in the Template ID field on the TMS_LoadTaskGroup tab, associated tasks are not uploaded automatically. This is because tasks defined by the task group template can already be in progress in the system. To upload a task group template's tasks, you need to explicitly define the tasks on the TMS_LoadTask tab in the Transactional-Task.xlsx spreadsheet.

The following figure shows the Transactional-Task.xlsx spreadsheet with the Template ID field referencing a template and also the TMS_LoadTask tab which must be filled to make sure any associated tasks are also uploaded:

CTM-LoadSupportGroupAssociation with Support Staff set to Yes

Data Management loads data hierarchically, in its order of dependence.

Data on which other data completely depends, is loaded first, and data on which other data does not depend is loaded last. The rest of the data is loaded somewhere in the middle of this continuum based on its dependency.

CTM:People data is loaded before CTM:Support Group Association data, because there is a hard dependency on the CTM:People data.

However, when a People record has Support Staff set to Yes, at least one support group association has to exist. Because CTM:Support Group Association data is loaded after CTM:People data, it is not possible to validate if at least one valid support group association exists or not. Therefore, when setting Support Staff to Yes, you need to manually check that one support group association will also exist after all of the data has been loaded.

Service Recon ID role in updating product categorizations

When updating data from the CHG:LoadTemplate tab of the Change Process Setup spreadsheet (Change_Process_Setup.xlsx), be aware of the role that the Service Recon ID field plays in updating the product categorization fields.