Offering to Add Users to AD Groups

David_Johnsen

Hi,

This seems like it should be a pretty basic task, that I assume hundreds of customers of SCSM have done, but the solutions that my colleagues before me have tried to implement seem incredibly over complicated. With HUGE runbooks and pages of powershell script etc.


What I need to do is create an offering that end users can fill in, and specify an approver, which via an approval activity, sends an email to the approver, who can approve or decline, before running a second runbook to make AD User Group Membership changes.

I think I can figure out the AD Group change runbook, but I can't get my head around the Approval stages. Which seems like it should be pretty much out of the box.

Is any able to help? Just a nudge in the right direction of some guides on this would be perfect.

Brian_Wiest

Would start with something like this http://www.scsm.se/?p=895

Tom_Hendricks

Have you looked at the Review Activities, yet?  If there is an email subscription for Review Activities, then SCSM would automatically send the members of the review group an email once the RA becomes active (technically, "In Progress").  This would occur on creation if the RA is the first activity.

You can have more than one RA if your process benefits from it, too.  Once an RA is approved, the next activity becomes "In Progress."  If that activity is a Runbook Automation activity, then it starts running, at that point.  If the RA is rejected, the subsequent activities do not run.

If you want users to specify the approver, that can be done if this begins with a Request Offering form.  One of the RO fields could be a user picker that is filtered on certain users or groups, the output of which is mapped to the Reviewers in a review activity.

You may have already looked at all of this, but I wanted to cover this just in case you had not.

David_Johnsen

Awesome @tom_Hendricks, yes that process is exactly what I had in my head of how it should work, what we've got running at the minute is 100 times more complicated!

I don't suppose you know of any guides on how to set these up do you? No worries if not, just might save me a few hours of trial and error!

Tom_Hendricks

I want to say that I have seen articles about this in past Google searches, but I do not have any saved that I can quickly post.  If you include the words "review activity" in your search, you should get some good hits I would think.

I have one additional bit of advice that will hopefully save some time for you.  Remember that the Reviewers relationship is several levels deep when working on the mapping:

Service Request --(Work Item Contains Activity)--> Activity --(Review Activity has Reviewers--> Reviewers --(Reviewer Is User --> System.User

Without looking (sorry, just browsing the forum to take a mental break from something I'm working on), I am not certain if there is a type projection (a.k.a. "Combination Class") in the system that you can use as your RO class, which will allow you to see the reviewer user object to map to.  If so, then you are all set.  If not, you may have to create one.  Type projections are intimidating the first time around, but are very useful and actually make sense after you have seen enough of them to compare and learn from.

Brian_Wiest

If you are using Notify Analyst app it works directly as it does for other workflows. Meaning as soon as the Review goes to in progress each reviewer gets the notification. 
But for me the notification did not contain much as all the necessary details to the parent work item so also implemented https://community.cireson.com/discussion/1802/review-notifications#latest and it works.
HTH

Tom_Hendricks

Brian_Wiest said:

If you are using Notify Analyst app it works directly as it does for other workflows. Meaning as soon as the Review goes to in progress each reviewer gets the notification. 
But for me the notification did not contain much as all the necessary details to the parent work item so also implemented https://community.cireson.com/discussion/1802/review-notifications#latest and it works.
HTH

That is a good point.  Anything you can do to avoid writing your own email subscription in XML (since we all know the logic in the UI isn't sophisticated enough for any actual situation) is a thing worth doing!

David_Johnsen

OK, so all sounding good, Thanks.

I've just looked and tried to see where I'd map the RO prompt response for the approver and I can't see a Property for it.

Am I doing something wrong, or do I need to use a runbook first or something?

Brian_Wiest

The response is after the work item is created at the review activity goes to active status. 
Then the reviewer can reply to the email in the proper format or access the portal and click the approve button. 

David_Johnsen

Hi @Brian_Wiest

I think I should be OK for the notification/response stage, the bit I'm stuck at is getting the reviewer specified on a Request Offering to map to the reviewers in the review activity.

The reviewer would always be someone different, so it's not just a case of pre-specifying a list of approvers.

Any tips/resources would be really appreciated.

Brian_Wiest

Would start with something like this http://www.scsm.se/?p=895

David_Johnsen

ah right. so you can go straight to map them from the RO? @Brian_wiest

Brian_Wiest

I would in the RO setup the users as related CI's attached to the Runbook, then use the runbook to make them related reviews. Sorry that is the best I have, I currently only use templates to manage the reviewers.