Right now at my company we are transitioning to Macs. The big reason for this is so we can use iChat. We were originally going to go with an iChat server, but since it couldn’t do what we needed it to do (and the Apple rep and our vendor lied to us about it) we ditched that idea and have been using .mac accounts to get everyone online.
Now, when we have a new user (which is most of the time since we are just getting the Macs started) we have to create an account and add all the account manually. We do, however, keep an excel spread sheet of all the .mac address, first and last names, and the group the user belongs to. I was wondering if some one could help write an apple script function that could accomplish going through the excel file (or comma separated file, whatever) that could go through the sheet and create the needed groups and then add the users to them.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I know very little about apple scripting.
There is one problem: Although iChat is fairly scriptable, it’s not possible to add buddies and groups.
A work around could be to install AIM and populate the list there.
That second script on the page may work, but the problem is that we would still need to go in and add everyone’s name into the iChat list.
That being said, what about the address book? If I can use the second script to get the aliases and groups created, can a script be created that uses the same text file to get the name information and the ailias into the address book. That way iChat will pull both information?
The buddy list depends actually on the account, not on the computer, and is stored on the AIM Server.
When you populate the list with AIM and open iChat afterwards, the buddy list should also be displayed in iChat
Yes but the buddy’s first and last names are stored in the users address book. One way I was doing this was by having a master buddy list and importing it to AIM after we created the account. Then I would import the master address book which gave all the users in iChat their first and last names.
For some reason, one of my coworkers is against using that method. (He doesn’t remember the reason either, he just won’t do it)