Organizations seldom work in silos. From logistics management to housekeeping, third-party vendors often play an integral part in day-to-day operations. That being said, their contact information should always be up-to-date in Active Directory. Help desks are often kept on their toes, constantly getting asked to add and delete vendor contacts. Manually keeping track of which department has made what request for which vendor—and following that up with timely contact provisioning and revoking—can be quite challenging. That’s not even mentioning the imminent danger of being crushed by this additional workload.
Active Directory contact management would be a lot easier if staff from the concerned departments were able to update their own contacts directly in Active Directory. But in the normal course of business, administrators can’t go around granting everyone directory access. So how does one go about streamlining contact management while also keeping Active Directory secure?
You’ve come to the right place for the answer to that question. Welcome to the next installment of our Building a better help desk blog series. We’ll be discussing how to construct a contact creation/deletion request dashboard for operations staff and make vendor contact management a cakewalk for your help desk.
Vendor-specific access to distribution lists
Now using ADManager Plus’ workflow module, operations staff can make requests for vendor contact creation without having to worry about membership to the correct mail distribution groups. Here’s how it works:
Help desks can create vendor-specific contact creation templates (e.g. logistics, housekeeping, or maintenance) using ADManager Plus. They can then add specific attributes to each creation template, including group membership information and email delivery restrictions. When operations staff request a new vendor account, they simply need to select that particular vendor’s contact creation template. After keying in the vendor contact object’s basic attributes, operations staff can request the contact be created as a mail-enabled contact (with an external email address).
With vendor-specific contact creation templates, group membership management that would otherwise had to be done manually after a series of cross-checks, becomes an effortless task for the help desk.
Straightforward contact deletion
Operations staff can now easily raise requests for removing stale vendor contacts, freeing the help desk from the burden of scheduling and undertaking a manual AD contact cleanup. When the help desk approves the operations team’s contact deletion request, ADManager Plus ensures both the object and its membership to distribution groups are removed instantly.
Get unlimited licenses for requesters—and deeper insights into vendor contacts management using ADManager Plus—by registering here before October 31th. Join our upcoming webinar to learn how to create a dedicated requests dashboard for your operations staff and start streamlining your Active Directory management. Be sure to watch out for the concluding part of this blog series on how workflow in ADManager Plus made one particular help desk’s job a lot easier.
