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. The
figure below shows a form table listing the users obtained through an
LDAP query on Active Directory.
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 the figure
below) ;
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)
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 section.
