UMRA – User Active Directory Kiosk Self Service

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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 – User Active Directory Kiosk Self Service

A recent request that’s come up for one of our clients is to build a way for there employees to manage their Active Directory information, such as address, phone numbers, email address etc. However, during this process they needed a way to ensure the user who is going to use a self service portal, or kiosk machine, needs to be who they say they are. This is quite the demanding task, however with UMRA this task now becomes easy. With UMRA I am able to use it as my backend logic tool, that will do all the processing, and updating of information in Active Directory. I went ahead and took this project a step further, and wanted to log all the actions that a user took when updating their information in Active Directory. So I logged into a MSSQL (You can use MSSQL, MYSQL, Access, Oracle, really any ODBC compliant database, even a text file if you wanted), who the user is, date time, what they updated, and the old value of the attribute, and the new value of the attribute. Now an admin can look back at anyone point in time, and get a complete user audit when needed. Ok, so some of you might be asking why you would allow your users to update their information in Active Directory, simple… Now the employee is responsible for their Active Directory Attributes. What can be updated you might be asking? You can allow the users to really edit any part of their Active Directory account for a UMRA PHP ASP .NET etc. webpage, it’s up to you what you feel they should be able to edit. In most cases, we see our clients request that the end user be able to edit first name, last name, middle name, display name, description, office, phone number, email, and other Active Directory attributes. Of course when creating a UMRA Portal to manage this, the limits are endless, you can have specific drop down box’s for different OU’s, data validation etc.

Now one of the main things to keep in mind here is the security on this UMRA Self Service Portal. In most cases I will use Windows Integrated Authentication to figure out who the user is logged into the computer, then when the user goes to your UMRA Portal UMRA in the background will take who logged in user, grab their information and display it on the screen, if UMRA cannot find the user, you can redirect them to a different page, and then have UMRA email IT or someone to notify them there was an error when trying to get a users information. Below is a quick screen show of a module you can make and integrate into your intranet site or make a stand alone Kiosk Self Service Machine.