Introduction
Many employees nowadays have access to a wide variety of systems and applications. Some examples are access to a company's intranet, phone systems, HR systemss, printers, etc. User accounts and associated resources are usually maintained in Active Directory (or other directory services). Larger organizations often have multiple information systems, in which case user resource data are also stored outside Active Directory (a SQL server holding HR data, phone book applications, location systems, etc.). Using UMRA, an administrator can create projects to deal with virtually any user management task.
In UMRA, the use of tables is an important instrument for supporting this concept of managing users and associated resources in Active Directory and other information systems, by facilitating the following tasks :
Managing and selecting user accounts, resources and other input fields - In case of a delegation project, a list table can be included in a form window to display and select fixed data (a list table), Active Directory data (LDAP query), results of an NT 4 network call or database data. Some examples:
to select a user for whom the password needs to be reset. shows a form table listing the users obtained through an LDAP query on Active Directory.
Figure 1 - Delegated project for resetting a password
to show a list of services or printers you wish to manage. A script action can then be executed for the selected table entry (see ) ;
Figure 2 - List of services as part of a delegation project to manage services (e.g. stop, start, pause, resume services)
to select data from a database (e.g. a list of departments or a table containing corporate telephone numbers)
Figure 3 - List of departments as a result of a database query
Manage the processing of tabular data (row by row) – this method is used to run actions against each row of a table. It can be used for instance, to query Active Directory for all the groups of which a user is a member and to perform an action for each group in the resulting table (e.g. setting a new group membership and removing the existing one(s)).
Bulk data processing - Tables are also used to facilitate the mass update of user data (e.g. mass creating Exchange mailboxes or bulk create and edit users as part of a migration project). In such mass projects, where a table is based on an imported CSV file, script actions can be executed for each row in a table (containing user resource objects, for instance). This specific use of a table will not be discussed in this document.
The last chapter of this user guide contains several hands-on examples to get familiar with the various table types. Each hands-on will take approximately 30 minutes to complete.
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