The essential toolkit for effective AD management:
Business Workflow with ADManager Plus

The essential toolkit for effective AD management: Business Workflow with ADManager Plus

Challenges

IT administrators feel the heat day in and day out, facing constant pressure to finish processing scores of requests for user onboarding and offboarding, user modification, vendor contact management, permissions management, and more.

Meanwhile, help desks face challenges in user onboarding due to their extensive checklists and dependency on HR inputs. Permissions management requires strict control over resource access, and managing vendor contacts involves tracking departmental requests and timely contact provisioning, all adding to the workload.

Solution

To meet these challenges, ADManager Plus helps reduce an IT administrator's burden with a workflow requester process (Fig. 1). With it, users can directly raise a request instead of needing to contact the administrator via email or service ticket. Since requesters input their own requirements, a workflow system helps ensure that requests are processed free of error. Administrators can also use workflow SLAs to prioritize sensitive requests, ensuring timely execution or reassigning the requests when needed.

After implementing a Business Workflow in ADManager Plus, you can perform trouble-free user account provisioning and deprovisioning, effortless group membership management, and simplified contact management. Just by adding existing organizational users, such as HR and operations staff, help desk administrators can empower requesters while saving time for other critical projects.

How it works

The approval workflow in ADManager Plus provides a quick fix for many of the help desk's day-to-day challenges. The workflow module now offers a simplified dashboard for authorized requesters to initiate user, group, computer, contact, and permission management requests.

Creating a workflow requester dashboard

Using ADManager Plus, admins can easily create a dashboard for users to raise requests. The request dashboard is simplified so users are given just enough permissions instead of the entire array of capabilities available. If a user wishes to raise requests for performing more tasks, those permissions can be easily added to the dashboard later. Figure 2 shows a complete list of available request types.

Trouble-free user onboarding and user management

For many help desks, their current user onboarding process involves duplication of work and too many delays. HR first sends the IT admin a user's details, and then the IT admin creates that user's account. Then HR verifies the user details and approves the new user account. Imagine how much time and effort could be saved if the HR manager could fill out the user details themselves, and the admin only had to approve the user creation request (Fig. 3).

Simplified vendor contact management

From logistics management to housekeeping, third-party vendors often play an integral part in day-to-day operations. ADManager Plus helps operations staff make requests for vendor contact creation without having to worry about membership to the correct mail distribution groups. Help desks can create vendor-specific contact creation templates (e.g. logistics, housekeeping, or maintenance) using ADManager Plus (Fig. 4). They can even add specific attributes to each creation template, including group membership information and email delivery restrictions. The corresponding stakeholders can also make requests for removing stale vendor contacts, freeing the help desk from the burden of scheduling and undertaking a manual AD contact cleanup (Fig. 5).

Secure permissions management

Effective permissions management is the underpinning of resource security in an organization. Inaccurate permissions could have effects ranging from employee idle time to something as devastating as a security breach. Contacting IT admins for granting or revoking permissions every time a user joins or leaves a department is tedious. ADManager Plus offers time-restricted file sharing and a secure resource access provision to ensure the safety of enterprise resources (Fig. 6; Fig. 7).