UMRA – Web Based User Group Management

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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 Based User Group Management

In previous blogs I’ve talked about ways you can manage users in your Active Directory through a UMRA web portal, thus limiting users from using Active Directory directly. One of the main features our clients ask for when creating a UMRA web portal with different types of Role Based Access Types is the ability to add or remove user group memberships either in bulk, or on a one by one basis. Both approaches are possible, however, in this blog I will talk a little about how you can really integrate user group management within a UMRA web portal. Now, there are a lot of pieces within Active Directory Group Management, and different ways you can manage your group memberships with UMRA, such as managing groups from the group itself. What do I mean? Instead of doing a search on a user, viewing there groups, then adding users as members of a group, you can do the reverse, and search in your active directory for a group, and view its members, and members of. So now you can manage these groups from this point of view, however I will talk about this in a later blog post.

UMRA – Web Based User Group Management Tips

If you haven’t already read how to create a basic web portal with UMRA, please read this blog here: http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/04/connect-to-umra-with-com-object.html. That blog will give you the basics on how to create a web page with UMRA and connect using the UMRA COM object. If you need some example UMRA project see this post: http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/06/umra-example-projects.html. That blog post is a great resource for UMRA example projects. So lets get started on how to get and or create a simple webpage to allow for your different Role Based Access Types to manage your Active Directory Users Group Memberships.

Step 1:
Create a search to grab users based on accountname, displayname, or another set of attributes.
UMRADatabale: http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/04/umra-com-object-loop-through-data-table.html

Step 2:
Within your ASP ASP.NET PHP webpage, create a hyperlink, or an AJAX call to get the users data from your list of displayed results

Step 3:
Within your UMRA Automation Project, bind to the user with the samaccountname (username) and get the users current group memberships. Loop through these the same as we would loop through your users search results.

Step 4:
Follow the same steps for searching for groups, as you did for users. You should now have 2 lists, 1 of user groups, and 1 of searched groups. Again, within your ASP ASP.NET PHP webpage, use javascript, AJAX etc. to make a hyperlink to click so the user can be added to the group.