In Sitecore 7.5 - how to handle users that are imported from a spreadsheet?

Question

I don't understand how to handle users that are imported from a spreadsheet using ECM in Sitecore 7.5. When I import users from a spreadsheet, ECM creates new users in the Emailcampaign domain. Also it automatically generates a username for the user based off of their email address. So if I imported john.doe@company.com from my spreadsheet it would create the following user: Emailcampaign\\john_dot_doe_at_company_dot_com.

What happens later when the actual John Doe comes to my site and wants to register on my site? As a developer, how am I supposed to handle that? Am I supposed to create a second Sitecore user for him like this: Extranet\\jdoe . Am I supposed to inform the user that we already have an account in the system for him and let him just supply a password or something?

As a web site user it would be very strange for me to visit a website and go to register and be told that they already have an account for me - even though I have never registered on the site before. I understand why ECM needs to create user accounts. It needs those user accounts to be able to send out emails. I just don't understand what the proper procedure is for me to later allow those users to register on my site.

Answer 1

In your example, if John Doe came to your site, he would not be registered. The first part of the user name Emailcampaign is the Sitecore domain. When the user comes to your site and registers, they would be in whatever the domain you have setup for that site. So probably Extranet

As a developer you don't really need to do anything to handle that, Sitecore's membership provider will work that out for you. The 2 accounts would be completely separate from each other.

As for how you want to handle that on your site is down to the business/legal requirements. If John Doe had to sign up for the email campaign on the site and then registered as a user on the site, it might make sense that the information is shared. If he signed up for the email campaign through something not directly related to the site, then there might be legal questions on what could be shared. eg did they tick a box that allows data to be shared with partners etc...

Ultimately sharing would not be too hard, you would just need to look up the data based on the users email address and then you could pull it into the account that was registered.