UMRA – Web Portal 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 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.