UMRA – Web Portal Work Flow Management

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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.