UMRA – Web Portal Self Service

If you haven’t already download the free trail 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 Self Service

In my recent blogs we’ve talked about ways to create a delegated Web Portal with UMRA Automation scripts. I’ve also covered way you can delegate out Active Directory tasks such as, user creation, exchange mail box creation, home folder creation, and other Active Directory and User Life Cycle. However, in this blog post I am going to give you an idea and some tips of how to create a Self Service portal for your Active Directory Users. Now, creating a User Self Service Portal with UMRA as your backend can encompass a lot of functionally such as, allowing users to maintain and update their Active Directory attributes, without giving them any elevated privileges in Active Directory. I’ve had some of our clients request such web portals to integrate the user change requests to be put into a ticket system, or work flow. So as you can see there are many options you can do when setting up a self service portal with UMRA as your backend tool, however keep in mind without UMRA you won’t be able to handle such requests quickly and with accuracy every time.

UMRA – Web Portal Self Service Tips

When you decide you are going to crate your users a Self Service with UMRA you need to focus on what you’re going to allow your users to update in Active Directory. Now, quick note we are only talking about Active Directory here, however, as you’ve seen in my other blog posts, UMRA has the ability to run command lines, connect to Databases and so on, so you can actually have your users control information from other systems. To the user it’s seamless, they don’t need to know where your pulling the information from, and setting it to. So below are a few tips to keep in mind when creating a Web Portal for Self Service with UMRA as your backend tool.

Tip 1 :Get a list of items you want your users to update
Tip2: Create smaller UMRA scripts to handle each update OR create a generic UMRA function to accept 3 paramaters (username,attribute_name,attribute_new_value)
Tip3: Log ALL actions to a database (SQL Access etc.)
Tip4: Turn OFF IUSER Account in IIS Security, and turn ON Integrated Security

UMRA – Web Portal Self Service Screen Shots

Below are a few ways I’ve integrated a self service portal in a few of my customer requests.