UMRA – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

Download Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM > Download

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 – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication

In previous blogs I’ve talked about ways you can have SSRPM as your user authentication method for an Employee Self Service type portal, or use both UMRA and SSRPM together to integrate an Employee Self Service option into the SSRPM web authentication. Both of these methods are very power, and scalable models, however as I’ve talked about before, SSRPM challenge/response mechanism can be used as a verification security system before another process is started. What do I mean? Well, since Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM has the ability to authenticate a user even if they are not part of your LAN or even in another domain, we can use this to our advantage. So how am I using this with Moodle? I was tasked to have Moodles LDAP Authentication method to check first if the user who is logging into Moodle, is actually enrolled into SSRPM, if they are not, then force them to enroll into SSRPM. If they are enrolled into SSRPM then allow them to log into Moodle. The second part of this is, if the user forgets his or her password, they can now use SSRPM to authenticate themselves using the challenge and response questions, once verified, they can now either change their password in Active Directory, or directly in Moodle.

UMRA – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication How To

So if any of you are out there trying to create such an authentication model using SSRPM and UMRA I will give you a few tips and a quick walk through on how you can accomplish this. First if you haven’t already, your Moodle install will need to have a test user who is not being authenticated with LDAP, and another user who is. You will also need to have a user who is enrolled into SSRPM and another test user who is not.

Step 1 -
Install SSRPM and configure it.

Step 2 -
You will need to edit Moodle’s login procedure, this is on login.php file located in the main root file, it’s not the file located in the blocks directory.
Tip –
You will see a method in login.php called “LDAP Authentication”, you will need to either run a function before this to check the username entered is in the SSRPM database. If the user is within the enrolled users table in the SSRPM database, then allow the user to login to Moodle. If they are not within the enrolled users table, then use the http redirect method to have them redirected to your SSRPM web interface.

I hope this helps anyone out there who is trying to do such a Moodle / SSRPM Login Authentication check. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or comment.

UMRA – SSRPM Web Based Employee Self Service

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here> Download
Download Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM > Download

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 – SSRPM Employee Self Service

Now I’ve talked about similar topics of Employee Self Service using UMRA, SSRPM or both of these together to accomplish this task. From what I’m going to talk about uses both UMRA and SSRPM together to create a very flexible and easy to manage Employee Self Service portal. When we talk about allowing users to control their information in active directory through an interface, we need to make sure we have some type of challenge and response or security wrapped around this approach. That is exactly where SSRPM comes into play, since SSRPM already has a ton of security and processes to challenge the user before either resetting there password, or even editing AD information, this will be perfect for creating our Employee Self Service. Now, where does UMRA come into play in all of this? UMRA will be used to get/set the active directory information after a user has authenticated them through SSRPM.

Now some of you might be asking yourselfs, why would we need to authenitacte through SSRPM before I let the user manage there Active Directyory Information. Simple, If a user is on an outside LAN, or logged into another domain OS/system,, this makes it almost impossible to figure out what user is trying to access there Active Directory information. So SSRPM challenge response questions fill this void, and provide the perfect solution to ensure secure user management account update transactions. Below I will talk about some very high level steps on how you would get a project like this started, and some tips that I’ve learned along the way.

UMRA – SSRPM Employee Self Service Tips

Now this is the third of fourth Employee Self Service I’ve built so I will try to start from the basics and really show you how to get something like this started. Now, keep in mind, we are going to talk about letting the user edit and control their information in Active Directory however, UMRA has the ability really to connect to any ODBC compliant database, so we can pull information from a HR, Student Information System SIS etc. Display this information to the user, and allow them to edit it.

Step 1:
Download and install Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM > Download
Download and install User Management Resource Administrator > Download
Configure both UMRA and SSRPM

Step 2:
Make a list of the items you want to allow your users to edit, either in Active Directory or another system.

Step 3:
You will need to edit a few pages in the SSRPM web interface, these files will vary depending on what you want to accomplish. If you want to keep the stock functionally within the SSRPM web interface, then you can add another button to the front page of the SSRPM web interface. (See the picture below to see how I added an additional option to the main screen)

Step 4:
After the user has authenticated them self’s using SSRPM challenge and response questions, you can now edit the page where they can edit and manage their attributes in Active Directory.
For my sample screen shot below, I list out the most common attributes, even allowing for the user to control who their manager is.
Tip – If you are going to allow the user to manage who their manager is you will need a mechanism that will search Active Directory and display the results in a user friendly fashion. I was able to accomplish this with AJAX and UMRA. After the user has typed in more then 4 characters, UMRA will go into Active Directory and search for matches similar to the searched criteria, and display them in a drop down, as the user types, it will continue to filter down until only 1 or no results match the criteria.

Step 5:
When the user changes an attribute, use UMRA to update these values in Active Directory. During this process, it’s a good idea to update a logging database to show time/date, action on, old attribute, and new attribute values.

I hope this helps anyone who is trying to accomplish a similar task.

UMRA – Web Based File Distribution System

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 File Distribution System

Hey everyone this blog is going to be a little different then my current blog posts. Most of my blog posts talk about projects that I’ve created, and completed. However, this blog is going to be about a current UMRA web based file distribution system for a local school district. I am about half way through the project, and found a few ways to create and manage such a system with using UMRA as your connector between the file system, and the users who you want to distribute these files out to. Now, distributing files to a current teacher’s roster is always a time consuming process, however I’ve come up with an easy way for the end user to do this. I will follow a lot of the same steps I’ve taken previous where I will create a list of users, select one, some or all, and then select the files I want to distribute out to them.

UMRA – Web Based File Distribution System How To

So as I’ve stated I’m only about half way through this process, and see my finishing it up here soon, so as I finish this project I will post the final steps and screen shots of how it all came together. Below are a few steps I’ve taken so far to get all the pieces in place.

Step 1 -
If you haven’t already, read on how you can create a data gird using UMRA and allowing the user to select one, some or many users from it. This data grid is critial to your overall flow of how the rest of the logic goes. A very good tip to keep track of what users are selected in your grid is to put either javascript or css action on your highlighted records, then store these records in a hidden field on your portal page.
Blog Post here > http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/06/umra-bulk-web-based-user-management.html

Step 2 -
Next step will be to get a complete list of Rosters a Teacher is associated to. I was able to create a view in my SQL database of the clients Student Information System (SIS) to get these records with a UMRA datatable. , Now your scenario might be different. However, the rules should still apply, you will need to make a list on where you want to distribute your files to, this can be a distribution group, a set of servers etc.

Step 3 -
Depending on you’re what you are coding your UMRA web portal in php asp asp.net etc. you can do this step multiple ways. Create a custom upload form, either uploading 1 file at a time, or a multi form upload, when the user clicks the “Distribute” button, your button for distribution, you will need to check to make sure that. I was able to create an upload button that will upload the files 1 by 1. This function will upload the file with UMRA to a temp directory, and when the user is ready to distribute these files, I will have another UMRA automation project that will take all these files in the temp directory, and distribute them to the selected Teacher Rosters.

This is what I have so far for this current client project. However, once its completed I will post some nice screen shots, of the final product. If you have any questions, or are stuck on a certain step in creating your own UMRA web based file distribution system just email me or comment.

UMRA – Bulk Web Based User Management

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 – Bulk Web Based User Management

Most of my other blogs have been on some type of web based UMRA controlled actions on a one by one architecture. However, with today’s fast moving environment, I’ve noticed this process is no longer viable. One by one actions for single user control is fine, however there are times when you need to do bulk active directory user updates, or bulk active directory user syncs with other sytems such as Moodle, PowerSchool, PowerCampus, and other SIS (Student Information Systems). I’ve been tasked with creating a local school district a Web Based Portal using UMRA as the main sync tool between active directory and end users. Our client was currently using Visual Casel for most of its active directory management, and bulk update / delete tools, however the flexibility for the end user to have full control over the application and create more control options was just not there with Visual Casel. However, with creating a custom UMRA – Web Portal you are able to expand past other products pit falls, and really create dynamic and flexible user controlled options on the fly. So with this blog I will give you an idea of how you would go about creating a bulk management tool, that allows you to edit one, some, or all users in in your active directory environment.

UMRA – Bulk Web Based User Management How To

As I’ve said before, having any type of tool that allows you to edit all of your active directory users is great. However, with most of these active directory tools out there, are very limited in what they can do, and only target a specific task. But, with UMRA – Web Portal you are now able to really create either specific tasks for current work flows, and even have the ability to create new work flows in the future. You’re not going to be locked down with just a specific tool. Ok with that said, the main part of getting something like this to work is getting all the users in your active directory to display in some type of grid, or data panel. There are a lot of methods you can use to get this done, so depending on if you’re using asp asp.net php or some other type of programming language try to follow these steps at a high level.

Step 1: Build a UMRA Automation project to get all your users, or a subset of users in an OU. This will depend on who you want to show up in your list.

Step 2: Create your webpage either to loop through your UMRA Automation projects datatable of users. Now depending on how many users we are talking about, you can take this next step in a few ways.

Step 3: If you are dealing with more than 2000 records, you might want to wright this information to XML, or store it in a temporary database. Why you ask? Well, if you want to have sorting options, you don’t want to be running your UMRA Automation project over again just to sort, so grabbing the data quickly from XML or a database would dramatically speed up your steps.

Step 4: Either with CSS or Javascript, keep track of what items were selected in your grid. I used javascript to check each time a datarow was highlighted or deselected.

Step 5: Build your tool bar, or buttons to control and fire off the actions you want to perform.

Step 6: Build corresponding UMRA Automation projects to link up to your tool bar buttons actions.

So there you have it, that is a quick high level overview on how to create a nice and simple Build Web Based UMRA – Web Portal. Below are a few screen shots of how you might do your layout.

If you haven’t already, please read my first post on where and how to download a trial version of User Management Resource Administrator, developed by tools4ever. UMRA

Download Trial Version of UMRA > http://www.tools4ever.com/download/
Download Trial Version of SSRPM > http://www.tools4ever.com/download/

UMRA – Staff / Faculty Roster Management

I’ve been tasked with doing an UMRA Automation project for a local Washington School district to automate Roster Creation, and Group / Resource management on these Rosters. Due to the Faculty / Staff to student relationship, we are taking over 30k records to manage, and make sure this UMRA Automation project was able to run multiple times a day. What is Staff / Faculty Roster Management you ask? For this schools definition was to have Security Groups in Active Directory created, and then students who are in the Staff / Faculty Roster (Data in SQL Database) to be added / removed from these groups. Then each group will have a corresponding folder system created for the individual Roster Groups, that give different permissions depending on the Roster Group. Now, this is no easy task to auto check these rosters within a UMRA Automation project. So I will try to give you a very top level overview of how I handled this project, and really cut each piece down into smaller pieces, to get this project to work.

UMRA – Staff / Faculty Roster Management Setup

When creating a UMRA Automation project to manage Staff / Faculty Rosters automatically you will need to break down each of the main tasks, into smaller tasks, since there are a lot of moving parts. First you will need 2 stored procedures or views in your SQL database. In my case I had 2 stored procedures I called, 1 with a staff / faculty to roster relationship, and another for the student to staff / faculty relationship. Now, when you’re dealing with 30K+ records you really need to focus on how to handle your data, and cycle through your data quickly. One was I did this was to have my UMRA datatable run specific queries against the stored procedures. Here are the steps below I did to break this project down into more simpler stream lined processes.

Step 1: Get Roster / GroupName mappings, how will the Rosters be named? Once you have this figured out, you can now have your first part of your UMRA Automation loop through the stored procedure and make sure all groups that need to be in Active Directory are there, if they are not create the group in the location it needs to be in.

Tip – If possible try to have the School – Faculty ID or Faculty Name in the GroupName, this will make it easier to parse later without additional UMRA datatable loops.

Step 2: Now that we have all the groups created in Active Directory, we can now loop through these groups and add/remove Roster members. Now there are a lot of ways you can do this, however the quickest way to do this is. Grab all groups that match your group creation above, put those into a UMRA datatable, now loop through that table, pass the GroupName (or your other ad attributes) to another UMRA Automation project, this project will pass data to your SQL stored procedure with the student to Roster mappings, this table will only bring back the results for what users should be in this roster, clear all members out of the roster, then loop through that table and add the users in 1 by 1, or turn your UMRA datatable into a multivalve variable and add them all to the group at once, both ways are fine.

Tip - Remember to do error checking, make sure you can do all pre tasks before adding users to their Rosters.

Tip – Remove ALL all users in the roster, BEFORE you do your loop to add rostered users.

Step 3: Now that we have all of our Groups for our Rosters created, and our students assigned to their current rosters, we can now loop through and create the Roster Home Folders. In my case, the Roster Home Folders were created in the same structure as the Active Directory Group mapping. So I created another table of all groups that met my group naming convention above, and looped through that table to create my Home Folders.

Tip – Make sure you do a check, IF the home folder exists, then go to the next record, IF it dosen't exist then create it.

This should get your started if not through most of having Staff / Faculty Roster Management Setup automaticly with a UMRA Automation Project. If you have any questions please feel free to email me or comment.

UMRA – ASP - ASP.NET - PHP - Portal Design

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 – ASP - ASP.NET - PHP - Portal Design

Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of emails on “what are the different ways you can create a UMRA Web Portal, and what ways do I prefer to create my portal for my clients in”. Well, first off lets me say that you can create a UMRA Web Portal in many different methods, such as ASP with VBScript, ASP.NET using VBScript of C#, even PHP. It really depends on what your clients platform for development. Since UMRA is a Windows Based product, and always installed on a Windows OS, all the portals I’ve developed have either been in ASP or ASP.Net. Does this mean you can use PHP to develop a portal in….no. If you client allows for additional modules to be loaded into IIS to allow the parsing of PHP, then by all means code in PHP. So to answer the second part of the emails I’ve been getting “what do I prefer for my portal creations”. I prefer to use just classic ASP using VBScript to create my portals in. Why not user ASP.net you ask? Well, most of our UMRA Web Portal approaches don’t rely on any enhancement that ASP.net brings to the table, plus when it’s time to turn over the UMRA Web Portal to the client, they will need to install additional software onto their serer, which in some cases is not an option. Now, I know some of you are saying “but you can edit .aspx pages in notepad, however, with a very complex design in your UMRA Web Portal this task is almost impossible.

UMRA – Classic ASP Using VBScript

Out of all the UMRA Web Portals I’ve built most have been in ASP using VBScript, with the exception of a few done in ASP.net. I’ll give you a few reasons on why I develop this way.

Lots of Resources
When developing a portal, you’re going to run into a process or you will have to create some process that UMRA might not be able to handle, so you will have to design something from scratch. Since ASP Classic has been out for a while, there are a TON of resources online, for almost anything your trying to do. In most cases the VBScript will be done for you, all you have to do is either tweak a few parameters, or copy/paste right into your UMRA Web Portal webpage.

Ease of Use
So there are 2 sides to this reason. One is the ease of use for the client. In most cases, our clients VM or machine we are developing on, we are not allowed to install software, and if we do, we have to go through a lot of hurdles and downtime for this. So with ASP Classic, we can edit he pages in notepad, with relative ease. Unlike ASP.net where you might have to install additional software free or not, upgrading or changing the use of the .net framework, to handle any page edits the client would like to make.

Now some of you still might be thinking, or saying come on move to the new technology with the .NET framework. Now, trust me I am all for using the latest and greatest to build my projects, however UMRA is doing all the "hard work" for us that the .NET framework would do. What I mean by "hard work" is, connecting to Active Directory, and doing some type of action on an object. Now, this applies to any object or downstream system that you might be integrating with your UMRA implementation. So an example of this would be doing some type of file manipulation, sure .NET can do it, but so can UMRA. UMRA is more then an active directory object manipulation tool, it can handle file objects, moving, deleteing, creaing, seting security etc. Plus UMRA has the ability to call sript from the command line, such as vbsripts, and now it fully supports powershell. So if there is something you want to do that uses the .NET framework, you can now just create a PowerShell script that does what your looking for, and the call it from within UMRA in your application. So I guess what is really comes down to is what do you want UMRA to handle, and what do you want to handle with code. If you want to handle alot of your actions with code, then use asp, php etc, however doing your actions within UMRA now give you the ability to edit these actions easily and quickly. So keep this in mind, if you want to learn how to do the complete piping of webpage to You wont need to hire a web programmer to edit these pages when you want to make simple changes, you can now edit your functions within UMRA with simple drag and drop actions, instead of recoding some webpage, and hoping it works. Now, dont get me wrong here, sometimes it easier or even faster to do something in code, then rather doing another call to UMRA to do your action. For example, if you wanted to check if a file exsists, as most of you know you can do this with a three or four line piece of code in asp, php, or .net. Doing this through the code it speeds up execution time, and saves you some overhead of having to manage one or two UMRA Portal Pages and one or two UMRA projects.
So as you can see there are pros / cons of doing it all in these different ways. Now it migh sound like I dont like to code anything in .NET however this could be far from the truth. I plan to move all my current projects over to .NET most of mine are now, but not fully modularized like I would like them. So what can you expect to see me coding my projects done in .NET and classics asp.

Now if some of you are wondering what I code my UMRA Portal Pages in, depending on what I am coding in asp, php, .net it will depend on my applications. Here are a few of the free applications you can use that are free. NotePad++, CofeeCup, and Visual Web Developer. If you want to go up to a more robust web editing tool, you can use Adobe CS4 suite, or get Dreamweaver. So depending on what you feel comfortable with, you can use any of the above applications to manage your UMRA Portal Pages.

So I hope this answers some questions you might have when getting ready to develop your UMRA Web Portal. Overall, you can create your portal in what best fits your current development environment, sometimes you are stuck with using a specific coding technique, and sometimes you get to pick and choose.

UMRA – SSRPM Web Portal Integration

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 – SSRPM Web Portal Integration

In my previous blog I talked about a product from tools4ever called Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM for short. Some of the clients I’ve built UMRA Portals for, also are running SSRPM for users in there Active Directory Environment, and they request to have functionally that SSRPM provides through its admin console, to be available to delegated users in there UMRA Portal without giving these users any elevated rights in Active Directory. Now, there are additional functionally within the SSRPM admin condole that we can integrate into the UMRA Portal such as unlocking/locking an account, viewing blocked time, blocked count, and any other piece of data in the admin console with the UMRA Portal. However, in this post I will focus on just doing a search for a user in Active Directory, and creating a simple hyperlink to pull back the selected users challenge and response questions and answers. Now some of you might be asking how this can be useful, and help your environment. You now have a way for Help Desk to search for a user through your UMRA Portal locate a user by id, accountname, employee number, displayname etc. Retrieve the users SSRPM questions, maybe ask the user these questions, and if the user answers these correctly, they then can proceeded with a specific action such as, updating an active directory account, resetting a password etc.

UMRA – SSRPM Web Portal Integration Walkthrough

I will keep this a very high level overview since there are a lot of moving parts when integrating multiple tools4ever products. So if you haven’t read the blog on how to do a simple search, and loop through a UMRA data table, then read this blog post below :

UMRA COM Object – Loop Through Data Table
http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/04/umra-com-object-loop-through-data-table.html

Tip : For this to work you need to make sure your passwords are stored without encryption.

Now that we have our simple search page working, when you kick out results make it so the samaccountname or even better the user canonicalname is a JavaScript function that runs a function called getssrpmdetails(usercn) and pass this 1 argument, that argument would be the user canonicalname. In SSRPM database, they store the user canonicalname when a user is enrolled into SSRPM. So now what we can do is do a simple search on your Access or MSSQL database, depending on how you have your SSRPM configuration setup. Now the user query to get the user by the canonical name is quite complex, however to get this query, or any other query that updates/inserts any record into SSRPM database, simple run MSSQL query analyzer and watch what queries are being called during that action. So once you’ve obtained your query, use that in your AJAX page, to display back the users questions and answers to the page. Now some of you might be asking, what happens if the user is not enrolled into SSRPM, simple you can do a check on the results that it brings back, if the user is not enrolled, just display a message on your page saying so. An just like that, you now have a UMRA Portal integrated with Self Service Password Reset Manager. Below are a few screen shots of how I did this integration.

SSRPM – Self Service Password Reset SSRPM

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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”.

SSRPM – Self Service Password Reset SSRPM

Now I am going to talk about a different product from tools4ever called Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM for short, in this blog. Why you ask? Some of my clients I build portals / intranet sites for also have this self service portal for their users to reset there password with. Most clients want some type of integration of SSRPM into their custom UMRA web portal. This will allow a delegated user the ability not only to manage the user Active Directory Attributes, but also view the users Self Service Password Reset Manager questions and answers, and other vital information of there SSRPM without having any types of elevated rights to additional programs. So lets talk what SSRPM does, SSRPM allows your users to have ability to reset there password in Active Directory 24/7 via a web interface, or GINA extensions. You as an admin, can add/remove users by OU or groups to be provisioned to use SSRPM, and you can customize the different options on how a user can enroll into SSRPM, allow them to pick and choose their question challenge and response questions, or even having the user create their e own.

SSRPM –SSRPM Web Interface / Portal

As I’ve talked about in my previous paragraph, there are 2 ways to reset your password, if you are enrolled into SSRPM, one of which is through the SSRPM Web Interface / Portal. The portal installs on a standard Microsoft IIS environment, VM with IIS work perfectly fine also. The SSRPM Web Interface / Portal allows for a user to perform all tasks associated with SSRPM, enrolling, resetting there password, and even unlocking there account if they locked themselves out of SSRPM. The SSRPM Web Interface / Portal is standard .asp pages mostly driven by css style sheets, and can be reskined or even integrated into an intranet site, or portal you already have in your company. Below is a screen shot of the SSRPM Web Interface / Portal.

SSRPM –SSRPM GINA

The GINA is the second way a user can use the SSRPM application. This deployment is typically pushed out via GPO or SMS. tools4ever built in a nice SSRPM admin template to allow for different provisioned users to have different options. So if you look at the picture below, we add the “Forgot my Password” button below the windows login screen. The same options through the SSRPM Web Interface / Portal apply here through the SSRPM GINA extension. This method however is not as customizable as the SSRPM Web Interface / Portal is, however you still have control for things such as multiple domains etc. See the picture below.

UMRA –SSRPM TIPS AND TRICKS

Some of you might be asking why I covered this different product from tools4ever called Self Service Password Reset Manager. Simple, a lot of our clients have SSRPM also running in there environment, and in later posts I will show you have to pull back data from SSRPM and display it in your UMRA web portal.

UMRA – Active Directory Reporting

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 – Active Directory Reporting

I was recently asked my one of our clients to create an automated way to pull active directory details in real time. Now, with this said, there are TON of reports you can generate in real time with UMRA on the backend grabbing all your data. Now, this blog post will really just go over how UMRA can pull data mine active directory in real time, but also I want you to be aware that since UMRA has the ability to pull from other systems other then active directory. You can now really create your own web based / portal reporting module tool. Ok, so 2 of the requests that I was tasked with to create are, “All Users Status” so a total count of users who are disabled, and users who are enabled, and “All Computer Status”, so same concept, they wanted to know all computer, and there current status. There are 2 ways you can take this approach when creating custom UMRA report. You can log all your data to a database that is pulled with UMRA or you can store all your data into XML files, and then read for those files. Why put them in XML files you ask? Some of your clients don’t have databases available to them, so this way, we can now create those custom UMRA reports, without connecting or requiring a database.

UMRA – Active Directory Reporting Tips

So anytime you are creating a Web Based Reporting Tool, you need to figure out 2 things, where to get the data, and how to display the data. So we already know where we will be getting the data, in our case it will be Active Directory, my client didn’t need to pull any additional information from any other systems. Ok, now we just need to know how we are going to display this back to the web page. So here are some of the steps at a high level, on how I was able to get this custom active directory reporting working.

All the steps below can be used for either Computer Object Reports, or User Account Reports.

Step 1 : Create a UMRA Automation Project that creates a table of ALL users.
Tip – You most likely already have UMRA Automation Project that does this, and it’s ok to reuse current script that may do this.
Tip – Here is a link on “How to create a table in UMRA”

Step 2: So for this step, you will need to decide on if you’re going to store your data in an XML file or database, again both are nice, it’s just up to what you have available to you. Now,Create a web page that will loop thought your database or XML file you created in your UMRA Automation Project. There are a lot of resources online on how to loop through a database, or XML file of data.
Tip – You most likely already have a webpage that does this, if you’ve been following the blogs.
Tip – Here is a link to “how to loop through a data table” Step3: You can do this step within step 2, or within your webpage. For a more speedy report generation, you can store the actual status of the computer or user account details in the XML file or Database. What I did in this step was store the status of the objects in the XML files, and when the user pulled up the custom report, it would show the status. I displayed a time/date when the report was generated, and another hyperlink to rerun the project, and get that data in real time.

UMRA – Active Directory Reporting Photos

UMRA – Web Portal Work Flow Management

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here >
Download 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 Portal Work Flow Management

In my recent blogs I’ve talked about how to create custom work flows with UMRA and the web. However, once these UMRA Work Flows have been created, we now need to find a way to manage these tasks. Now there are 2 type s of management of your work flows we can talk about, 1 is how you delegate out these work flows to your RBAC types. The 2nd is how you will manage and change these UMRA Work Flows as your business rules change. I’ve also received some questions on what is the benefit to creating a UMRA Work Flow in a portal or intranet site, compared to just creating a custom UMRA Automation Script that does all the work. Both ways of creating your work flow are great methods for taking care of different AD or Downstream system tasks. However the one big benefit to creating a custom UMRA Work Flow through a portal is the fact that now you or who ever created the UMRA Automation Script that is doing the work behind the scenes, has control over the action through the portal. Plus, your users who you delegate to create work flows don’t need to have access to the UMRA Console.

UMRA – Work Flow Delegation

So you now have all your UMRA Work Flows built and you need to assign and or delegate them out to different Role Based Access Types you’ve set up in your portal. Most likely you will have these different RBAC types stored in a database of some type. So I will tell you how I created the 2 to relate to each other. I have 1 table that holds the UMRA Work Flows data that I’ve created, and another table will hold the different RBAC types that you’ve set up. Then I created another table that will hold the different ID’s of the UMRA Work Flows and match those up with RBAC type ID’s from my other table. After that is done, you can create a few simple .asp .php asp.net pages to manage these tasks. Below are a few screen shots.Here I’ve clicked on the “User Icon” before my Work flow, and it will pull up a screen to the right that will show the available RBAC types, and I simple select them from a drop down, and hit “add” this will add this type to my table we talked about above.

UMRA – Work Flow Management

I will keep this topic at a high level, since there a lot of moving parts to managing your UMRA Work Flows. Since your UMRA Work Flows can be a simple 1 action task, or a 30 line task, you will need to make sure that your database methodology is set to grow and be flexible enough to accept larger scripts data. How did I manage this? I created 2 tables, 1 table of the Work Flow name, and another table that holds the actions associated with the UMRA Work Flows I’ve built. I then created a nifty “edit work flow” page that allows you to edit each of your work flows actions, and add/delete an action as needed. See the below screen shot.
Here in this screen shot, I selected my work flow, and it displays the work flows actions to the right, and I can now click on one of these actions, and edit its properties.

UMRA – Example Projects

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 – Example Projects

First off I would like to thank everyone for their emails and questions hey have been sending me. I’ve been getting a few emails requesting sample UMRA Projects that they can download instead of looking at pictures through my blog. So to help some of my blog followers, I will post a few sample code pages, and the UMRA Projects that are associated with them in a .zip file, this way you will have everything to get my example up and running. Here are a few of the requests that I’ve received on “How do you do this…” type requests.

UMRA – Example Projects Questions

Question 1:
How do you create a user with UMRA from a webpage, and then get back the username that was crated?
Answer :
We would take the same approach as we’ve talked about in previous blog post, on how we send data to our UMRA Project , then once we call the ExecuteUMRAProject COM method, we can now get a UMRA Variable Text from the script. So if you are using a “Create User” drag/drop action, you can now grab the %username% variable back out of the UMRA Project and display it on the page. The example UMRA project .zip file below contains 1 sample page that calls a UMRA Project and grabs a variable called %my_set_text% out of the script and displays it on the page.
Download: http://www.joefoxportfolio.com/downloads/1.zip

Question 2:
How do you Loop through a table of data that is from a database such as MSSQL or Oracle or any ODBC databse, from within UMRA Projects, and then display them out on a web page?

Anwser:
We would loop through the table the same way as if it were an LDAP query that filled the table with data. Only difference is, the columns are now defined by your query, or view that fills your table, and not columns we define in our attributes we want to grab from AD directly. So contained in this zip file, is a .asp page that grabs a table of data, however, you will need to configure the “Generate Gerneric Table” action within the UMRA Project, however this should give you an idea of how to get this running.
Download: http://www.joefoxportfolio.com/downloads/2.zip

So those are 2 commonly asked questions I’ve been getting from my readers, and I hope it helps you with creating and developing your web based UMRA Projects. I will post more UMRA project examples here in the future as I get more requests.

UMRA –Work Flow Delegation

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 –Work Flow Delegation

This blog post is in continuation of my previous post on how to create Custom Web Based Work Flows with UMRA. If you haven’t already read that blog post, you should since it contains pre work and “how to” about what we are going to talk about here. So as in previous blogs I talked about how to create a custom Web Based Work Flows with UMRA so by now you should have either some work flow system in place, however, in most cases you now want to delegate out these work flows to different groups or delegated users in your Active Directory structure. With this in mind, I’ve created a very flexible way to create Role Based Access Types (RBAC ) that are database driven, and can be created very quickly, no more hard coding these different Roles into your config file. Now, some of you might be asking, how do these work with the Web Based Work Flows with UMRA you just made with UMRA. Well, you can now create custom user roles, and assign those Work flows you created to a specific roll. So below, I will give you some tips on how to integrate both systems into 1, and give you a few screen shots of how I implemented this.

UMRA –Work Flow Tips

You will need to create another database for the different user types you will have coming into your portal. In most cases, we can now bind a specific group members in Active Directory to a Role Type. Now, some of you might be asking, what happens if a user has multiple Roles that you have binded to your Role Based Access Types. You can handle this in many different ways, in some cases, you can display a drop down, asking the user to select what type of RBAC they want to be, or take the first RBAC that matches in your different RBAC types. So where do you begin? First you will need to setup another table in your database, just to hold and map all the RBAC types, then you will need another table to map the RBAC types to your Custom UMRA Work Flows. Once, you’ve done this, you now can display these out onto a simple webpage, or intranet page to have your usertypes run these at will. Below are some screen shots of how I implement this.

In this screen shot I created a RBAC type called “Service Desk Room 555” and binded it to a group in my AD structure, for now don’t worry about the radio box’s below the group binding.


Here I now can go back to my UMRA Work Flows and click on the little user icon in from on the Work Flow name, from here it will show me all my custom RBAC types we’ve create, and I can assign or remove access to this work flow from here.


So now I have a custom search, that brings back searched results based on a users samaccount name, from here I click the username, and it will bring up windows that shows only UMRA Work Flows that are assigned to my RBAC type. If I click one of these UMRA Work Flows it will take the user, and run then through your UMRA Work Flows.

UMRA – Web Portal Work Flows

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

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 Portal Work Flows

Now when we talk about work flows, there are a lot of ways you can create a work with UMRA. However, in this blog post, we will talk about creating a custom database driven work flow system with UMRA as your backend logic tool, and then we will talk about how to create a custom work flow within UMRA. Now, some of you might be asking what a Work Flow is, since there are a lot of different means of this depending on your different business flows, I will focus on what a few of our clients have asked to create for their work flows. One work flow I will talk about is, having delegated tasks such as termination/disabling users, having these request put into a ticking system, or approval system. The second is creating a custom database driving work flow, and delegating these out to different Role Based Access Types (RBAC).

UMRA – Work Flows

So the first UMRA Work Flow we will talk about is having delegated tasks through a web portal, added to a ticking system before they hit AD and make the changes. So how does this work? Here is a high level of how this concept works. You will have multiple levels of User Access to your web portal, this can include Help Desk, and then your upper level Role Based Access Type that can approve these tickets. Help Desk would go to a simple portal page, or intra net page, search for a user and click a hyperlink to disable a user. In most cases, you would just have an UMRA script go and disable the user, or run your work flow on the user. However, instead of this, we are now going to add this record to a database, this database can be SQL, Access, Oracle, etc. Since your .asp .net .php etc. web portal can use standard connection strings to access these databases. Now that your request is added to your table/database, you can now display a custom page to your RBAC type that has access to see these requests. This page can be a simple page that loops through any open tickets in your DB, and has a simple hyperlink that would run your UMRA Work Flow on that user.

UMRA – Web Based Work Flows

So in the previous paragraph we talked about creating a custom UMRA Work Flow within UMRA and having its actions placed in a ticketing system. We are now going to take a different look at how we can really maximize the web, and create UMRA Work Flows that are database driven. Some of you might be asking yourself, how this can benefit you and your portal users. Very easy, you can now create custom UMRA Work Flow without giving someone access to the UMRA console, and you wont even need access to the UMRA console. Did I loose you yet? Ok we will talk about this at a high level, and I will show some screen shots of how this is possible. In UMRA you can create smaller scripts that do direct tasks, such as, enable user, disable user, add a group to a user, remove group from a user, move user, etc. Now, on the web, you can create a “Work Flow”, and then add actions to these work flows, then edit these work flow actions, very similar as if you were to create a work flow like this directly through the UMRA console. Now some of you might still be asking “why don’t I do this through the UMRA console”. Again, you now can create your own “move user “ etc. flow, and have your RBAC types create their own custom work flows, without needing access to the UMRA console. However, when they add an action to their work flow, they are turn using your custom UMRA script on the backend, how cool is that!Here are some screen shots!Here I created a new Work Flow called “Managers Disable User” I will click on the gear icon to edit my action.



Here I clicked the “add action” icon that gives me a quick list of actions ive added to my portal work flow actions. After I added a few of these, I can now edit these actions.



Here I click on the gear icon, this allows me to edit each of these actions in more detail.



Our final step will be to assign this work flow to a RBAC type, since you don’t want all your users to use this action, you can now select from the RBAC types that you created.



So now that we have all of our UMRA Work Flow created and assigned I will show you in my next blog how to create RBAC types that are database drivin, and how to run these work flows against users in AD.