Active Roles 7.2 - Administration Guide

Customization using ADSI Provider and script policies

Active Roles offers the facility to customize its off-the-shelf functionality using scripts and applications that interact with the Administration Service. It allows a high degree of customer modification to meet specific business and organizational needs. This gives customers greater flexibility when using the product, and enables them to build solutions that can easily be integrated with existing systems and data.

The following list shows some of the ways in which the product can be customized:

• Using the Active Roles ADSI Provider, the existing proprietary applications or custom Web-based interfaces could communicate with Active Roles to perform administration and provisioning tasks on user accounts and groups.
• Using policy scripts, custom corporate rules could be enforced to regulate data format and administrative workflows.
• Using policy scripts, the data stored in an HR database or ERP system could be incorporated into the administration and provision of users.

Active Roles makes it possible for user-developed scripts and applications to manipulate directory objects through the Administration Service (persistent objects), and to take control of objects that are in the process of being created, modified, or deleted with Active Roles (in-process objects).

Having programmatic access to persistent and in-process objects makes it easy for developers to customize Active Roles in these two areas:

• Creating custom applications and user interfaces
• Enforcing corporate administrative policies by running custom scripts (script policies)

Custom applications and user interfaces

A custom application or user interface can be created to manipulate directory objects in Active Roles. Active Roles offers the ADSI Provider to communicate with the Administration Service using standard COM interfaces that conform to the Microsoft ADSI 2.5 specification.

Custom applications are executables that provide data to the Administration Service or retrieve and process data from the Administration Service. For example, an organization with a separate Human Resources database could develop and deploy a custom application that extracts personal information from the database, and then passes it to the Administration Service in order to facilitate user account provisioning.

Custom user interfaces are usually Web-based interfaces that distribute certain tasks to users. Custom user interfaces can also be used to streamline the workflow of network administrators and help-desk operators. For example, Web-based pages could be created so that help-desk operators only see the fields related to user properties that they can view and modify, according to the corporate standards.

Both custom applications and user interfaces rely on the Active Roles ADSI Provider to access the functionality of Active Roles.

Custom script policies

Active Roles provides the ability to implement administrative policies by running user-developed scripts. This makes it possible to:

• Facilitate the provisioning of user accounts  Populate user properties through external database integration and automate multi-step provisioning tasks.
• Maintain the integrity of directory content  Prevent inconsistency of Active Directory data by enforcing update-sequence and data-format policies across the enterprise.
• Enforce business rules  Maintain security design and capture administration expertise by integrating business rules into the administrative workflow.

Once configured, the custom script-based policies are enforced without user interaction. Active Roles automatically handles the execution of policy scripts that supplement particular administrative operations and trigger additional administrative actions. For example, policy scripts can be used to:

• Perform a sophisticated validity check on input data
• Synchronously change information in multiple data sources, such as the Active Directory store, Microsoft Exchange server, and HR or ERP-system database
• Ensure that delegated administrators follow a prescribed administrative workflow
• Link multiple administrative tasks into one operator transaction

Dynamic groups

Active Roles helps streamline group maintenance by defining group membership dynamically, with rule-based membership criteria. Dynamic group membership eliminates the need to manually update membership lists for security and distribution groups.

To automate the maintenance of group membership lists, Active Roles provides:

• Rule-based mechanism that automatically adds and removes objects to groups whenever object attributes change in Active Directory
• Flexible membership criteria that enable both query-based and static population of groups

The membership criteria fall into these categories:

• Include Explicitly  Ensures that specified objects are included in the membership list regardless of any changes made to the objects.
• Include by Query  Populates the membership list with objects that have certain properties. When an object is created, or when its properties are changed, Active Roles adds or removes it from the membership list depending on whether the object’s properties match the search criteria.
• Include Group Members  Populates the membership list with members of specified selected groups. When an object is added or removed from the selected groups, Active Roles adds or removes that object from the membership list.
• Exclude Explicitly  Ensures that specified objects are not in the membership list regardless of any changes made to the objects.
• Exclude by Query  Ensures that objects with certain properties are not in the membership list. Active Roles automatically removes objects from the membership list depending on whether the objects’ properties match the search criteria.
• Exclude Group Members  Ensures that members of specified groups are not in the membership list. When an object is added to any one of the selected groups, Active Roles automatically removes that object from the membership list.

These membership criteria are also applicable to Managed Units.