One of the most useful things about ActiveRoles is the customisation that’s possible through the web portal.  From creating customised wizards for different account types to buttons that run scripts, there is a lot you can do to make the experience of administering Active Directory data more intuitive for your IT Teams. If your teams are organised they will have written processes, operations guides or a mixture of the two for the tasks they carry out via ActiveRoles.  Why not consider publishing this through the Web Interface?  It then puts the relevant documentation within easy each of the users.  If you’re proactive, you can start keep this document up to date by adding information on your commonly asked questions.  By creating this kind of document and making it available you allow users to self-educate and use ActiveRoles the way you have intended within your organisation and over time, this will hopefully reduce the ‘How do I … ?’ questions that keep coming up.

To do this, you would need to create and publish your user guide on an internal intranet site.  The contents of which can include how to create new users, how to create new groups, how to work with the specific approval rules you have set up, any attribute value requirements you have and so forth.  Once this is publish and you have a URL, fire up the ActiveRoles Web Interface and click Customisation then Navigation.  You’ll want to add a new item to the Help menu, click the relevant options ot add (it’s extremely self explanatory).  Specify the title to appear on the Help Menu i.e. “AD Operations Guide” and in the URL field enter javascript:window.open(“URL”) where URL is obviously the URL to the document.  Click OK and save the changes then reload the Web Interface.  Your users will now have an easy access link to a guide (that you should maintain) which tells them everything they need to know to manage AD Objects in line with your processes and policies.  It’s a little addition that you’ll find adds some big value and hopefully, minimises some of those “How do I ..?” emails that plague you so much.

Experiment with it and add whatever you feel is relevant, it’s an easy way to connect ActiveRoles users to relevant documentation they need to do their jobs.

Categories: Active Directory, ActiveRoles