Reprovisioning & Change Management
Apologies readers for the prolonged silence on this blog. Let me pick up the discussion from where I left in my last post.
We already talked about the need for request management and customized workflows. Next I want to talk about re-provisioning or maintenance of OCS configuration for user accounts.
On a typical day, IT help desk in a mid-to-large enterprise handles hundreds of support incidents related to user configuration updates. Depending on the business rules and regulations some of these updates can be continually complex and time consuming. These updates often fall into three broad categries:
- Updating the use configuration settings for a user. A user may have been promoted or moved to a different project and hence the entitlements for the user have changed. Or, may be the user account was mis-configured to begin with and now needs to be synchronized with their entitlements and configured accordingly. In either of these scenarios an administrator has to manually fix the configuration settings for the user account.
- Often system administrators do a phased roll out of various OCS features. They start with a initial set of features for a small group of people and then later expand the coverage to a bigger group with more and more features. Planning a phased rollout has always been a maintenance nightmare for administrators.
- Additionally, system administrators are continually improving the business processes which eventually results in changes in entitlements for existing users or re-provisioning of user accounts with new configuration settings on different server pools.
The provisioning system should be extensible enough to adapt to the enterprise’s specific needs not just from an initial on-boarding perspective but also as an ongoing update to enforce the rules and policies for all users.
Ensim Unify enables system administrators to automate several maintenance processes which can be configured to ensure that everybody’s entitlements are enforced in the account settings. For example – if the SIP URI for a user is configured to be same as their email address, the maintenance jobs will ensure that this rule is enforced at all times. Any inconsistencies or mis configurations in the deployment will be detected and corrected by the system without requiring any administrator intervention.