Introduction

The Active Roles Administrator Guide is designed for individuals who are responsible for creating and maintaining Active Roles’ administrative structure. This document provides conceptual information about the product, and includes instructions for deploying a secure, distributed administrative structure that combines administrative policy enforcement, role-based delegation of administration, and flexible administrative views.

The Active Roles Administrator Guide is supplemented with the Active Roles User Guide that provides information about the Active Roles console user interface, and includes instructions to help delegated administrators perform day-to-day administrative activities using the Active Roles console.

About Active Roles

About Active Roles

• Main features
• Technical overview

Main features

Active Roles provides out-of-the-box user and group account management, strictly enforced administrator-based role security, day-to-day identity administration and built-in auditing and reporting for Windows-centric environments. The following features and capabilities make Active Roles a practical solution for secure management of users and groups in Active Directory (AD) and AD-joined systems:

• Secure access  Acts as a virtual firewall around Active Directory, enabling you to control access through delegation using a least privilege model. Based on defined administrative policies and associated permissions generates and strictly enforces access rules, eliminating the errors and inconsistencies common with native approaches to AD management. Plus, robust and personalized approval procedures establish an IT process and oversight consistent with business requirements, with responsibility chains that complement the automated management of directory data.
• Automate account creation  Automates a wide variety of tasks, including:
  • Creating user and group accounts in Active Directory (AD)
  • Creating mailboxes on Exchange Server
  • Populating groups
  • Assigning resource in Windows

  Active Roles also automates the process of reassigning and removing user access rights in AD and AD-joined systems (including user and group de-provisioning) to ensure an efficient and secure administrative process over the user and group lifetimes. When a user’s access needs to be changed or removed, updates are made automatically in Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, Skype for Business and Windows, as well as any AD-joined systems such as Unix, Linux and Mac OS X.

• Day-to-day directory management  Simplifies management of Exchange recipients, including mailbox/OCS assignment, creation, movement, deletion, permissions and distribution list management; groups; computers, including shares, printers, local users and groups; Active Directory, including AD LDS.

  Active Roles also includes intuitive interfaces for improving day-to-day administration and help desk operations via both an MMC snap-in and a Web interface.

• Manage groups and users in a hosted environment  Works in tandem with One Identity Quick Connect in a hosted environment where accounts from a client AD domain are synchronized with a host AD domain. Active Roles enables user and group account management from the client domain to the hosted domain, while also synchronizing attributes and passwords.

  The solution uses out-of-the-box connectors to synchronize your on-premises AD accounts to cloud-based services such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Skype for Business Online and SharePoint Online.

• Consolidate management points through integration  Complements your existing technology and identity and access management strategy. Simplifies and consolidates management points by ensuring easy integration with many One Identity products, including One Identity Quick Connect, One Identity Manager, Privilege Password Manager, Authentication Services, Defender, Password Manager, Webthority and ChangeAuditor. Extends the capabilities of PowerShell, ADSI, SPML and customizable Web interfaces.

Technical overview

Active Roles divides the workload of directory administration and provisioning into three functional layers—presentation components, service components, and network data sources.

Figure 1: Active Roles Components

The presentation components include client interfaces for the Windows platform and the Web, which allow regular users to perform a precisely defined set of administrative activities. The reporting solution facilitates automated generation of reports on management activities.

The service components constitute a secure layer between administrators and managed data sources. This layer ensures consistent policy enforcement, provides advanced automation capabilities, and enables the integration of business processes for administration of Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and other corporate data sources.

The Administration Database stores information about all permission and policy settings, and other data related to the Active Roles configuration.

On a very high level, the Active Roles components work together as follows to manipulate directory data:

1. An administrator uses the MMC interface or Web interface to access Active Roles.
2. The administrator submits an operation request, such as a query or data change to the Administration Service.
3. On receipt of the operation request, the Administration Service checks whether the administrator has sufficient permissions to perform the requested operation (access check).
4. The Administration Service ensures that the requested operation does not violate the corporate policies (policy enforcement).
5. The Administration Service performs all actions required by the corporate policies, before committing the request (policy enforcement).
6. The Administration Service issues operating system function calls to perform the requested operation on network data sources.
7. The Administration Service performs all related actions required by the corporate policies, after the request is processed by the operating system (policy enforcement).
8. The Administration Service generates an audit trail that includes records about all operations performed or attempted with Active Roles. Directory-change tracking reports are based on the audit trail.

Let us examine the three component layers.

Presentation components

The presentation components include user interfaces to serve a variety of needs. The user interfaces accept commands, display communication, and give results in a clear, concise fashion.