Employee Document Management - Bulk Import

[nmaneely]

We are exploring the use of Employee Document Management and the Bulk Import capability from a Local Directory (not Cloud) and have some questions for the Community.

1. Can the files to be imported for each Employee be stored in a folder for each employee and contain a number of subfolders containing the different document types to be imported? (Image 1)

2. If the Employee is identified in the parent folder, does each of the documents in the subfolders also have to contain the identity of the employee (Image 2) or do all files to be imported need to reside under a single parent folder (Image 3)?

3. Can the import be run multiple times as either more Employee folder/files are added or do folder/files already imported need to be excluded to prevent creation of duplicate Employee Documents?

[Susan Britt]

My experience has been with a single folder for all, with the individual files named in a manner to indicate the user, document type,  file name. I am not saying it cannot be done though.  It's ServiceNow, anything can be done.  🙂 It's been years since I've done a bulk import.  To take advantage of the OOB functionality from last time I used it, I don't think the nested folders will work.  You could have some flow that runs scripts possibly to crawl through folders..?

The import can be run multiple times. This is pretty normal, since getting files digitized and named appropriately usually happens in waves by employee, file type or location. 

If you didn't want to do a lot of custom scripting or anything to try to get nested folders working, you could have multiple iterations setup with different starting folders (e.g., having folder for all onboarding docs for all employees and process those in one run).