UMRA – Web Based Work Flows

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – Web Based Work Flows

Just recently I was tasked with creating portal for South West Washington Schools. This project consisted mainly of a web portal that will allow multiple departments to handle Active Directory tasks via the web, and have UMRA take care of all the backend work flows ie: group management, file share creation, user creation, and account updates. Now, one of the tricky parts to this portal was they have 30 schools in there district, and hundreds of user creation, and user management options. So creating portal with both process for different role based access types, and for over 30 different school locations is no easy tasks, however, with UMRA doing most of the work for the backend work flows, it made this tasks a lot easier. So this blog post will show you and give you some tips and how you might go about creating a web portal similar to this scenario, and give you some ideas on how you can integrate your work flows into you usermanagment lifecycles.

UMRA – Web Based Work Flows Tips

So here are a few tips that might help you when you try to create a portal of this size. Create Smaller “Function” based UMRA projectsWhen you have a lot of different Work Flows that you need to create in UMRA , create them in smaller projects, so if you have to manage groups, have 1 UMRA project that will take 2 parameters : 1 samaccountname 2 ground DN. This UMRA Automation Project will be called “Portal – Remove Group From User”. Now you can use this project anywhere in a work flow you create for your user. Now on the flip side, lets create another UMRA Automation Project that will accept the same parameters however, this script will ADD a group to a user. You can now do the same exact steps for Disabling a user account, and reactivating a user account.Some sample “Functions” you may have.

Portal – Add User To Group
Portal – Remove User From Group
Portal – Remove All Group Members
Portal – Disable User
Portal – Reactivate User
Portal – Move User

All these functions above will be very small UMRA projects that accept 1 or 2 parameters at the most. So how does creating smaller UMRA Automation Project help you with your Web Based Work Flows? Simple, now you can create your work flow with the smaller functions, and manage your Delegated Work Flows easier.Example of Work Flow:UMRA Automation Project Name : Portal – Work Flow Disable UserYour Script will follow your normal Work Flow, however now you can “call” your other smaller “Function” based scripts.

Get User AD
Call Function > Portal – Remove All Group Members
Call Function > Portal – Disable User
Call Function > Portal – Move User

Now as you can see his new UMRA Automation Project Work Flow we created, is comprised of almost all “function” based scripts you created previously. Now when you need to change how a “Move User” action takes place, all you need to do is edit 1 UMRA Automation Project script, and not 3 or 4 other UMRA Automation Project scripts. I hope this helps you in designing your portal, keep a close on this blog for more quick and cool tips on how to manage your active directory via we portals with User Management Resource Administrator UMRA.