So it’s the start of another school year and what’s become part of my new routine for the start of the year is approving all of our Evernote Premium accounts.
The process is a fairly simple one. We have a sponsored group that faculty, staff and students can access via a unique URL. All someone need to do is to click the “Join Group” button and enter their username and password… simple right?
The issue I’m dealing with is verifying each of our 1000 plus accounts to make sure the person is either employed by or enrolled in the school.
When a person clicks the “Join group” button and enters their information an email is sent to the group admin(s) to approve the account. It’s this verification process that requires time.
I’m currently cross-referencing a database of all of enrolled students in the school against the names of those in the emails and approving each on individually.
Evernote provides a nice interface for approving these accounts and can be handled in a bulk manner which makes the process easier, but I am still hung up on how to verify each account.
The ability to export the users from the management interface via a CSV file (a suggestion I offered) will help in the future, but the issue currently is the lack of a match field.
Since users can enter their own full name, username and email address someone like myself could enter “Bill” in the Evernote system and what I have in my database is “William”. There is no unique field available in both systems.
What I am doing is recording the users Evernote account name and email address. I expect to do this for each user once (with new employees and students added each year) and in the future use the username as my unique key to match against an internal database of “active” users (faculty/staff/students) and manage those accounts which qualify for sponsorship.
If all of this seems somewhat confusing and disjointed it’s because it is… it’s a process I am working through and trying to figure out. I will be sure to keep you posted on my progress.
If you’re sponsoring Evernote accounts for your school or organization I’d love to hear how you’re managing users.
