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, with constant pressure to finish processing scores of requests for user onboarding and offboarding, user modification, vendor contact management, permissions management, and so on.

For help desks, the challenge in user onboarding is having an exhaustive checklist of things to do, with each task extensively dependent on inputs from HR. It would be a lot easier if they had a single dashboard that let them collect and validate all those inputs before rolling up their sleeves for all the data entry that is to follow. In permissions management, the challenge is ensuring that only authorized people have access to important resources. Needless to say, vendor contact management requires manually keeping track of which department has made what request for which vendor, and following that up with timely contact provisioning and revoking—and that can be quite challenging. That's not even mentioning the imminent danger of being crushed by this additional workload.

Solution

To meet this challenge, ADManager Plus is built on the premise that much of an IT administrator's burden can be reduced by instating a "workflow requester process" (Fig. 1). That means that the requesters, instead of contacting the admin via email or service ticket, can directly raise a request themselves. Since requesters input their own requirements, a workflow system helps ensure that requests are processed free of error.

Administrators now have to only approve these requests, thus preventing duplication of work by requesters and admins. After implementing Business Workflow in ADManager Plus, customers can leverage their existing investment to 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 admins can empower requesters while saving time for other more 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.

Figure 1. An overview of the Business Workflow feature in ADManager Plus.

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.

Figure 2. All AD management request types available in ADManager Plus.

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).

Figure 3. A sample user provisioning template in ADManager Plus.

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).

Figure 4. A sample Create Single Contact template for a logistics and transport vendor.
Figure 5. A Create Modification Request template for removing a vendor contact.

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).

Figure 6. Secure resource access provisioning.
Figure 7. Time-restricted folder sharing.

Summary

ADManager Plus helps enterprises streamline AD management by giving admins a way to:

  • Let users like HR managers, line managers, department managers, etc. create unlimited workflow requests.
  • Reduce employee downtime with effortless instant provisioning and modifications.
  • Manage a stream of third-party contractor and vendor contacts effectively.
  • Share folders and provide resource access securely.

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