Automate User Provisioning for Smoother Onboarding and Offboarding

Introduction to User Provisioning Automation

Right. I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar on automating user provisioning.

My name is EJ Stanley, and I will be your presenter for today's session.

At Fortra, I serve as a solutions engineer supporting our automation solutions, which include automate. Also under our automation umbrella, we also provide workload automation via our JAMS product and our IDP solution, which is Automate Intelligent Capture, helps our customers with data classification and data capture, typically unstructured documents. If you'd like to learn more about either of those offerings, please let us know.

Alright. Looking at our agenda for today, we're gonna cover why and how we should automate HR processes. We're gonna spend some time talking about the challenges organizations see and the benefits of deploying an automation strategy. We're then going to have a quick demo with Automate Plus. So there, we're going to see a mock up of an example HR or user onboarding type workflow. And then we're going to show how we streamline that process using Automate Plus. And we'll try to save some time at the end of the call for questions and answers.

And depending on which interface you might be using, putting a question in the chat can be a little bit different. If you're in the GoToWebinar browser interface, you'll see a section at the bottom that'll say enter a question for the staff. You'll simply just type in your question there or comment and hit send.

If you're using the Instant Join app, you'll first navigate to the question mark with a circle around it, then type in your question and then hit the blue send button at the bottom.

Overview of Fortra's Solutions

Alright, before we jump into our webinar content, just wanted to take a moment to really highlight the entire Fortress solution set in a quick overview. You know, we're going to be spending a lot of time in the automation side of the house, but we also offer a full line of cybersecurity solutions to help your organization as well. So our infrastructure protection suite, which consists of our vulnerability management and offensive security solutions, really allow you to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities in your systems, which I think we see all too often these days, understand which of those vulnerabilities may be exploitable, even conduct red team exercises to understand how an attacker could exploit those vulnerabilities. And more importantly, the best way to respond to those.

Our data security suite, which consists of our data loss prevention, digital risk protection, secure file transfer, and email security solutions really allow you to identify that sensitive data so you can wrap the appropriate security controls around it without becoming a barrier to those legitimate business processes that you need to execute. Also allows you to ensure that when that data is being shared appropriately, it is being shared securely as well, and protect that sensitive data from external threats, such as ransomware, spyware, and even phishing.

Our threat research and intelligence offerings enhance our host of threat feeds through researching and augmenting our data collection. Additionally, they leverage our threat fusion center data to find new threats that may have been missed by automated classifiers or operations analysts because we know mistakes can get through, as well as investigate confirmed threats to analyze trends or even identify attackers. Now, our automation solution, again, we'll be talking about some today, allows you to boost productivity, you know, improve accuracy, help your organization grow by handling those repetitive manual workloads, and provide non technical users with the means that automate tasks, while also allowing highly technical users to automate, you know, those really complex business processes, you know, slightly what we'll be looking at today, but also things like batch processing as well.

All is a means to free up valuable IT resources, again, by automating those time consuming tasks, such as manual monitoring, optimization, and so on.

And our centralized analytic solutions, simplify product administration, centralized key metrics, provide mobile control.

And our new Fortran one platform, it provides dashboards for security and operations data, you know, really helping customers deploy our software. And many products today already have user interface accesses from here and you can even do analytics from this panel as well.

The Need for Automating HR Processes

And with that, let's go ahead and get into our content for today. So why would we want to automate HR processes? As we know in many organization, HR processes, you know, they can really be quite manual. It's usually because the processes are, you know, dealing with disparate and non integrated data sources, right? So it's manually filled in, sometimes even electronically filled in, forms that are used which can introduce transcription of data errors into these systems And there may not be a single source of truth, which can complicate those processes even further.

So what HR processes can be automated? So as we can see from this slide, we have both onboarding and offboarding examples shown. So in our onboarding process, we see a common process of setting up users in Active Directory. You know, this could be another authentication environment as well.

The creation of user accounts in various applications, and then granting appropriate permissions that might be needed, and then updating the groups a user or users belong to in that authentication environment.

And this could be part of the overall lifecycle as well the employee in your company, so as people are moving between different departments, different roles, for example.

And then when it's time for offboarding, you know, we're often reversing our actions that we performed in the onboarding exercise. So, we're now removing users in Active Directory, we're deactivating accounts in those applications, you know, particularly in situations where we have users in Active Directory, but we also maybe have user account information stored within our specific applications. And then, of course, removing authorizations or removing permissions for users, that can be simple as if the user has access to a file system, for example, you know, just changing permissions on those file systems to deny access, as an example.

So here we see some of the most common HR processes on automate, not all encompassing list, but just some common ones that we typically see. As we discussed in the previous slide, active directory and user provisioning, So in most organizations, this aspect of the HR process, you know, particularly would benefit from some level of automation. We talked about a few of the common ways automation is applied or could be applied in this process, but that could also be taking data, you know, from forms, maybe from spreadsheet, for example, and then populating other data sources, so making databases, GUIs. So, you know, so UI front ends, for example. A key component here is to have some sort of normalization of the data to make this successful as an automation candidate. Right? We need to be in that data formatted into a way that we can easily use it in other applications and other processes.

So web browser automations here as well. You know, so, you know, maybe in our company, some of our HR systems are accessible via web browser. In a lot of cases, you know, there's no integration between our authorization environment and a sub office, or, you know, think of a main office. And this is something we've actually worked with previous customers here at Fortra. You know, one example, the offices of that company were split across different countries and the sub or think of the satellite offices, you know, they maintained their own instances of Active Directory. So there was no trust really between the two environments. So that sub office, you know, was really left to do this manual transcription process, right?

Automation allowed them to open the HR system via a web UI, take that user information from their local environment, and perform the keying into that data into the interface, you know, typing the characters, pressing the submit button, you know, waiting a couple of seconds and then repeating those same same steps for the next user in line.

And this was an extremely impactful manual process for that company. And they were dealing with several hundred users on a routine basis, which isn't an uncommon story in a lot of organizations.

Next, we have an image based OCR, right in most organizations, a certain amount of data is entered into various forms. So, know, think about traditional onboarding forms, like legal and tax forms, role specific documents, emergency contacts, you know, things along those lines. And it's not always online data that we're dealing with. So we need to have a means to capture, you know, that data.

Think about PDFs and other types of forms that we might be dealing with.

And then of course, we have items like, you know, data extraction, transformation and entry automation. So you really can think of this like an ETL process, right, where we're capturing or extracting data, we're manipulating it into a suitable format so they can be entered into, know, let's say one of our HR systems, you could consider this as a data normalization exercise, we talked about the importance of that a moment ago, but really the takeaway is to be able to take disparate data and then get it into a standardized format that we can use.

And finally, listed here is application integration. So, know, our users need to be given access to the applications that they use in their roles so they can perform their day to day work. And if those applications don't have pre built integrations, you know, into Active Directory, for example, then that could result in a manual exercise of having to extract and enter information into our application, those configuration into our applications, you know, to allow that user access.

So these are areas, you know, that can be prime candidates for automation in our HR process.

Alright, so now let's look at the process and organization might go through.

Mapping Current HR Processes

And this is a high level view here. So we're not focusing on really any specific application or technology in this view. You know, when we set out to implement automation, it's always a great idea, you know, to map out the steps that are currently involved in our process. And we kind of try to visually show that here. So here we can see in the before section, you know, there are quite a number of steps with a number of them being manual.

We've got email notifications going out to our managers, you know, to make them aware of new employees officially starting, the manager emails, the support team to advise, you know, we need a new account created for this user. And then that kicks off a process to perhaps, you know, create a help desk ticket or multiple help desk tickets, you know, depending on the work that needs to be performed. Our help desk ticketing system, it may already have some automation here to make our support team aware of work that needs to be completed. And then all the way until we send out a confirmation back to the manager, you know, to let them know the work was completed. So looking at this, we can start identifying a lot of potential failure points. Emails may get missed, managers get upset, right, or users are delayed getting access to systems, which can stop work.

Transcription errors lead to invalid accounts being created, which then may lead to permissions being signed incorrectly to users, or users could incorrectly get added to production systems when maybe they only need to be accessed, have access rather to development systems.

Our before scenario, which is, you know, quite common to see, it's driven by emails, custom spreadsheets, it can lead to ambiguity and confusion. And what we really want to do is eliminate as much of those manual and error prone steps, you know, to simplify and streamline our processes. And that is represented here on our after view, or our happy state as we might refer to it.

And using a solution like automate plus, you know, it allows us to accomplish these tasks with relative ease.

And the benefits are numerous, a reduction in time to complete, increased accuracy, and we can build an audit trail of what's being performed along the way.

All right. So let's dig in a little further to the process that most organizations would go through from hiring our new employee to the retire or off boarding stage, so really our entire employee lifecycle.

Understanding the Employee Lifecycle

There are large amounts of data that accumulates over the lifecycle, and the HR group has to manage applications and associated documents for employment. It's often not as simple as it seems on the surface. You know, just fill out a form and you get no employee, right? And as a new employee, you're probably going to receive a lot of data. You know, some system contains forms, some through email, you know, things like policies and handbooks, and all that data needs to be managed by someone.

And the hiring team and the HR system, you know, they need to support all that data as well. Then as we move down the lifecycle, past the first few days, we have more paperwork documents that need to be maintained for an employee, such as reviews, status changes, pay rate changes.

And then at some point, our employee time will come to an end with the company, maybe it's retirement and they'll retire happily, or maybe they're moving on to another great opportunity, but more paperwork and data associated with that process as well.

So let's next take a look at the application process.

And what we're trying to do here is paint a picture of how we can start automating these processes. You may have a standard application process, depending on what your organization does and how it operates.

For example, you may have a single form or document that you want prospective applicants to fill in, you know, provide you with their basic information and background. And then we take this information and bring it into our automated processes to make it a lot easier to bring employees on board.

We're looking at some of the aspects of the first day, you know, that may need to be addressed. Keep in mind here that this is representative of an environment with without full automation or total automation being in place today. You know, depending on the role and the size of the company, the employee might expect, you know, a PC, being able to log in for the very first time, having access to email, you know, so these are examples of all the things that need to be set up and managed for a particular user.

And if we move forward, there are going to be ongoing processes that are involved with HR throughout the employee lifecycle. So we've got more form updates, things like employee reviews, training, what certification have our employees completed, Are we performing any competency testing our employees to make sure they're in the right role within the company, etcetera.

And then of course, on the last day, we have to deal with tasks like returning issued equipment. So PCs, office badges, exit interviews, and all this information needs to be documented and recorded as well, you know, so that we know we've actually performed those tasks. And some of these processes, know, are always going to be manual, like someone physically handing in door keys or an ID badge, right? So some things are physical, which cannot be automated, but we can certainly work towards making the process more efficient by implementing automation, you know, wherever possible.

Strategies for Automating HR Processes

So this brings us to the heart of the discussion, right? How are we going to automate our HR processes? So, you know, let's further outline, kind of the various aspects that can make, that could be automated rather using automate plus.

And we'll see some of this in the demo portion later on. But to speak to this, we can take some of this information, you know, and really build a workflow where we can gather, evaluate and execute parts of our previously manual process. So one key process we might want to start with is querying our authorization environment, you know, which might be active directory, can be something else, and then getting that user information out of those systems to work with. These are some of the examples of the information we can gather, and this data will be useful to us throughout the process. So, you know, being able to query and report on inactive users, you know, users that have logged in or inactive over a certain time period, disabled users, failed login attempts, right, we can report on all this information and make that extremely valuable.

So some additional potential automated processes that take place for onboarding new users can be seen here. And a lot of these are input output type events, You know, a daily news user feed, for example, you know, this might be coming in from emails from management teams.

It's a feed that is coming into our environment, you know, telling us there are new employees that are joining our company.

Websites and FTP files. So this could be an extraction process, you know, maybe that's already in place, and we're taking that data from an existing HR system and feeding it into our automated process. The key thing here is that we want these inputs to trigger user creation. And by triggering user creation, it covers the following steps where we want to create the user, you know, we want we want to set those AD attributes, we need to set up information in AD so that other people can then start using those inquiries, right? And this information becomes very important, especially if you're in regulated environments, you know, you need to know for a particular employee, you know, who's their manager, what department are they in, because that can be used to determine what applications they actually really should have access to. And tight access controls are extremely important, as we mentioned, especially in regulated environments, maybe using financial services as one example.

So, the next part of the process then is integration of users from that single source of truth.

And so our single source of truth is either typically going to be an HR system or our consolidated data that we've normalized. And then we're going to put that information into, let's say corporate applications that we want our users to use, right.

So, we've received information from the HR system, which feeds into account creation with active directory. And then in turn, we can use active directory information to interact with enterprise applications potentially, or we might integrate with those directly depending on the application. You know, we might not have a programmatic rather way to interface into those systems, but we can still automate those processes either using Windows application interaction or website integration, it'll be a browser and automate makes it extremely easy to do that with our web browser and recorder capabilities.

And then, of course, for the applications, you know, that do support that programmatic interaction, you know, we can then use automate to interact with the application through a service, you know, maybe it's an API request, for example, maybe it's our native actions for Active Directory.

We're going to be building a workflow, you know, really effectively, that's going to be taking that flow from an HR system into Active Directory, and then entering in or uploading information into those needed applications to complete that integration process.

The Importance of User Auditing

Now, one area that can potentially be overlooked as an automation candidate in an organization is the ongoing auditing of users, particularly in companies with very strict regulations in place.

These organizations are often bound by SOC or ISO compliances, and this can be an intensive manual task that gets performed on a regular basis.

And the steps laid out here are kind of representative examples of what a company might have to go through, say, on a quarterly basis, for example. So we're probably extracting user records from multiple authentication and authorization sources. Then we might need to generate a list of applications and folders or directories that those users have access to.

Maybe this is partially automated already today or maybe it isn't, right? But we want to try to get it that way. We want to be able to validate, filter, clean up reports, you know, so maybe in step one here, where we pulled user data, we have that spreadsheet, for example, and then we take a subset of that data and create another spreadsheet or cross reference spreadsheet that is then sent to managers for some validation of that data.

And we're saying we managed to find out all the applications for your department or unit. And this is a list of users, based on the best knowledge we have that show that they have access to these applications.

So Mr. Manager, Mrs. Manager, can you please confirm and respond that this is accurate or note needed changes. So now we go into this kind of waiting process.

And this is typically done via email, waiting for our managers to respond and validate our data. So we're extracting a lot of data from a lot of applications, you know, that can be a real pain to complete accurately. We have tons of manual steps along the way. So automation really can make this a much easier task.

And because we can audit our automation, we can keep our auditors, you know, happy as well.

Alright.

Introduction to the Demo

With that, it's time for our demo portion of the webinar. And we're gonna be looking at automate plus today, in our demo environment. And just a second, I'm gonna pull up, our workflow designer to get started.

Alright. Here is our, workflow designer. So what we want to demonstrate, in this demo is really a potential outline or suggestion of an HR process for onboarding user accounts. And we're going to see this via a workflow we have here using automate plus.

The automate plus workflow designer allows us to lay out our entire business process and connect individual processes together via flow control mechanism. So success paths, failure paths, evaluation, you know, even logic like waiting for multiple processes to complete before we move forward in that process. So let's go ahead and just kind of recap or cover our workflow about everything that's going on here. So we got multiple individual tasks. These are representative here by these gray icons.

And the very first process that we're going to do here is create essentially a shared data set. Now data sets in automate are nothing more than objects that we can store data into. And creating this data set in a structured way is going to help us with our data normalization exercise. So as we collect data, we're going to put into a format that is normalized or we know about it static, and then we can more effectively use that data in our downstream processes. And in addition to, you know, data sets, even variables and arrays, we can create those at the workflow level.

And then we can reference that data throughout additional processes in our workflow. So we can create a data set here. Now we're going to fill it with data in another step, and then we can reference it in all the downstream processes as well. So that's what a workflow designer allows us to do is create very reusable, shareable data in our process.

Data Collection and Triggering Workflows

Now, another key activity in our workflow is going to be the second step here, which is going to be actually bringing in data from a remote remote source. And in this example, that's gonna be an email or multiple emails that we're gonna get some attachments and that contains that new employee data. Now, we could trigger this workflow multiple different ways. We're going to do it manually today during our demo, but there's multiple different things that we call conditions or events and automate that allow us to trigger an automated workflow to start. So, you know, we're getting these our data source in this example via email, you know, so we could have an email trigger setting here that we could drag in monitoring that email inbox, new emails arrives gonna trigger our plot process to kick off, We can also have a schedule sitting here.

That way we could trigger things on a durational basis, you know, maybe we're checking every day for new employee emails, maybe we're checking every four hours, Right? So the cadence that we can look for, and we're not limited to a single condition, we can have both a schedule and an email trigger setting here. You know, maybe we also get some of our user forms and via a file system. Someone's manually dropping those in a network directory. So we can have multiple conditions kicking this off. We're just going to use a manually kickoff today for this demonstration purposes though.

And a couple of the things that point out, mentioned, you know, the success paths and these evaluation paths, but you'd also failure paths built in. You know, here in our first example, we're creating this data set, you know, what if we didn't do a cleanup exercise And, you know, we tried to recreate a table a second time that would cause a failure. Right? So we actually have a failure path built in here.

Handling Workflow Failures

So this failure scenario is going to go to a completely different task, and it's gonna look for that temp table to see if it exists. If it does, it's gonna clean that up, and on success, it's gonna go back to the very start of our task. So we can have some built in logic to, you know, perform survivable events to accommodate for, you know, failures in our workflow as well.

So as we look over the rest of the workflow, you should start seeing some of the basic similarities from what we saw, you know, in the slide deck earlier. So, you know, we are using those evaluation capabilities to make a determination on, you know, do we have any spreadsheets that we need to process? Because, again, that's one example of the way data can be received. Or do we have any PDF documents to process that have come from our email, you know, as an attachment in this case. And in both scenarios, if that evaluation is false, you know, we don't have a valid file process, we're sending out notification back via email, you know, in our false path. You know, maybe someone wants to be notified, the number of attempts that we get or user accounts that we get or why we didn't receive something that maybe we expected, right?

Otherwise, assuming we got new data added, you know, we've got two parallel processes running here, where we can run those different processes in parallel, just like, you know, multiple people might be doing in a manual step.

And you'll also notice on each one of the, our task objects, you know, we can dictate or specify which automate agent is going to run that particular task or execute that task. And that's because with our automate plus architecture, you know, we can have or support a multi execution environment. So we can have multiple agents sitting in our environment, agent groups, so we can build some different agent group distribution methodologies and failover capabilities in our environment.

I'm gonna be running everything on a single agent today. And again, that's for visual purposes. And I can do that because all of but one of our tasks are background processes. So that means they don't need to use any shared resources on the machine. So you know, keyboard, mouse, an application, or browser, we only have one of those tasks, where we're adding some users to a web application. So everything can run behind the scenes on a single agent as example, but know that you can spread out that work across multiple machines in a true production environment. So the idea so far behind this workflow, you know, is fairly typical.

Parallel Processing in Automation

You know, what you could possibly have here is you got parallel activities that take place, you know, the human beings were performing previously. And what we want to do is utilize automation to take over all these manual tasks, right? So once we've collected this data, here's a good step to point out this weight object. You know, our processing of our XLS attachments might be quicker than processing our PDF attachments. And but we need all of those files to be processed before we start creating new users in our active directory. So we can actually wait for these multiple processes to finish and both of these complete before we move on downstream. So some some logic built in there to help us from a timing perspective, which is which is good.

So after we collected the data, you know, then we're going to create our new users in our authorization authorization environment, which is active directory in our example.

And then once we have some additional user information, we're then going to add our users to a few different applications that we want our users to be able to work in. Now we're going to add all of our users to our automated application. Everyone we hire is going be automated developers for us. We're going add a couple of users to a service desk, and we're going to add some users to a just a really makeshift demo web application.

So kinda covering the different ways a couple different ways we could add users. So be an API call here for our adding users to automate, a direct database add here for our service desk application, and then we're actually going to see some front of glass or UI automation, adding users to our makeshift, web application. Then once all their users have been created, again, we're going to wait for all those processes to complete. And then we're going to email our management teams, I'd let them know those users have been added.

Creating Users with Automation

And I'm going to actually open up a couple of these tasks, just so we can kind of see how simple it can be to create these things, you know, using automate. So let's open up our process PDF attachments task here. And, you know, the first thing I wanna kinda point out is that as we open up the automate task builder, which is our, you know, gooey drag and drop interface, where we build out those step level instructions that make up an automated task is that there is no coding built into this task at all, right? This is all built using our native drag and drop actions.

So no C plus no dotnet. Everything we see built here was using those native actions, which provides us with that no code, low code way of building automation. So if we open up one of these particular tasks, like, you know, here, we're getting a particular OCR region from our PDF, you know, we're supplying it some of that shared data set information we talked about earlier. Now, we're using the OCR engine, which is Tesseract, to actually look for a specified region on that particular document, and we're pulling out that data and storing into a variable that we created, you know, multiple different ways we can capture data using OCR.

And OCR is really meant for, you know, structured data that we know is not going to change.

You know, if our PDF sources had, you know, they were well formatted, we could take advantage of another method, you know, maybe using our PDF actions to look for the various fields inside of that PDF document, or scraping the text layer off of that and maybe using regex or another method to get the data that we need to get off the document. So typically, there's more than one way to approach automation, we just try to find the path of least resistance, you know, and if it's structured data, that OCR is a great candidate. If it's unstructured data, you know, we have solutions in our toolkit, like our IDP solution, that's great for unstructured data, right?

Uses machine learning artificial intelligence to find out where those fields exist on documents. But we kind of step through what this task is doing, you know, we created a few variables up front to store our data in, We establish a connection to the database where we created that temp table earlier, and then we loop through any of the attachments that we found for our PDFs. And we're just grabbing the individual regions that contain the user information that we need. And we're removing some white space, you know, off of the fields that come in in case someone actually put in, you know, extra carriage return or space, right?

We're cleaning that stuff up. When we insert that data into our our database, you know, we don't have any formatting issues. And then we're routing some things out to a local file. So we're doing some auditing as we go, and then we're ending and closing up that SQL connection.

Once we've completed our particular task. And the same thing goes for other types of tasks here. You know, we've talked about adding users to our automated application. And again, you know, we're using things like our native active directory actions to list all the objects in a particular container.

We're grabbing out particular fields. We're storing that into a dataset that we create locally.

We're doing some regex in this example. We're formatting some email contents.

Know, we're inserting things into variables. We're using an API call here to once we've created some JSONs and the data that we've collected, you know, we're doing a simple API call into our automate instance with that file that we create contains our JSON to create our automate users. So, there's multiple ways that we can interface with different applications.

Interfacing with Applications

You know, an API doesn't have to be required. You know, we talked about using a UI method as well. So if we look at those tasks that's using our web application, you know, again, we're creating some variables, tapping into that same data set to get the users that need to be added to our web application. We're actually using our automated recorder in this example to open up our browser, and we're setting some web elements. We're clicking on buttons, you know, we're looping through that list of users. So we can interact with multiple applications to take all this disparate data and enter it into those various systems and applications. You And then once we have all of our users created, and we're doing that same wait function here for all these processes to complete, and then we're going to email our managers with all that corresponding information.

So before we kick off this workflow and we execute it, let's take a quick look at some of our systems here or representative things of our system. So let's take a quick peek at our email inbox.

So here we can see our source for this method. Right? We have a Office three sixty five mailbox. We've got multiple emails that I've sent into this account that contain, you know, some user request forms.

So we have a couple PDF attachments, and we have three different Excel attachments. And that's what we're gonna be out getting, their processing to get our user information that we want to to create. We're going to be creating our users in our Active Directory environment. So currently, don't have any users in this particular object, but we're going to be creating some of the users in Active Directory.

Executing the Workflow

And if we go into our automate server management console and look at our users panel, currently, we have five users in our day, we're going to create some new automate users automatically as well.

Alright, so again, we talked about we're going to manually kick off this workflow, but I'm going to get our first step in the process here. We're going to create our data set and from our ribbon area, I want to choose run from here.

And then what's gonna happen is our first task is gonna start. So we're gonna start creating our our dataset. We're gonna visually see some things pop up here in a moment as the task is or the workflow is executing an individual task are are being executed. So we'll see some blue pop ups, occur in kind of the lower right hand side of our screen. So that create data task dataset task is now executing. And once it completes, if we had a successful result, then it's gonna go on to the next step of our process. So now it's going out to our email inbox.

It is looking for any emails that meet that criteria, seeing if there's attachments present. If there are, it's going to save those to a couple different directories.

Now we're using our evaluation method to determine if there were files that needed to be processed and looks like we did have in both cases files to process. So that's going as normal. So now it's processing the PDFs and processing the Excel files, and we'll see if these finish at the same time or if one completes a little bit sooner than the other.

So now those are both working through. It looks like our Excel file is completed a little bit quicker than our PDF, so now that wait condition is coming to play here. So it's waiting for our PDF to finish processing.

User Creation in Active Directory

And once those finish, then it's gonna satisfy that wait requirement. Now we're getting our users are gonna be added into active directory. So we've collected the data from our two different source methods. So our PDF and Excel files, we stored those into our, dataset that we created as part of our data normalization exercise. And now we get our users created in AD.

And once that has created or been completed, then we're gonna start adding the individual users, into the various applications that they need access into. And at a certain point here, we should see, our web browser opened, and we'll get an example of seeing a quick demonstration of working with our our UI interface.

And that ding, if you're hearing in the background, is our emails arriving into our inbox. So we're getting our emails processed as the accounts are being created. So here comes our web application being opened. So it's opening up a browser for us.

It's gonna take some of that user data. It's gonna enter it into the first and last name field. Just press submit button. We got the new user add a successful, message.

It's gonna loop through the remaining users that need to be added into this interface. So we got a second user being added there.

And let's see if we have another one that gets added to our web application.

So this would be, you know, saving a repetitive task of opening up a browser, you know, keying in data, pressing the submit button, waiting for that validation message, going to the next user, you know, automates taking that repetitive mundane task and performing it automatically. You know, we've demonstrated that we can do that through multiple different application types. So once that process has been completed, got another email with some additional users being added, and then now we're gonna send some additional emails to our our management teams with that information. And, you know, we had a process in here to do some cleanup work at the end. I disabled that for our demo today so we could go back and take a look at the different environments, kind of see what was created, throughout our process.

Workflow Completion and Email Notifications

So once that email step has completed, our workflow would be would be done.

And, you know, we automated the entire process. Our, removed dataset did not run again because we had that disabled as we can see in our output panel, there below. So now let's go into our our email inbox, take a look at some of the the emails that we received. So now here we've got users that were added to our web application. You know, we sent it to our operations team, letting them know that those were the users that we added.

We sent a user to our automated administrators. You know, here's the users that we added into that application. Here's the users that were added into our service desk, and here were the users that were added into Active Directory. So, you know, we're sending email notifications, letting folks know, you know, what occurred. If we go into our AD environment, you know, we looked earlier, and there were no users in this object.

Verification of User Creation

Now we can see that we have all of our users have now been created for us in active directory.

And then if we go back into our automate server management console and we refresh our users panel, now we can see all those additional users that we added into, into automate. And if we look at our workflow panel, we can see all the folders we created automatically for us. Right? Look in the repository.

All those folders were created for those those users as well. And one other thing I'll point out, we talked about, you know, satisfying auditing requirements, you know, is we can set up logging templates in each of our tasks, and it'll essentially create a folder with the task name. And inside of those task or folders, rather, it's gonna start collecting auditing information that we can look at. So, you know, here's an example of some self auditing that we performed where we started the task name, add users to automate.

We talked to we've logged each individual things that are happening along the way with time stamps. So here, we successfully connected to our domain controller to get that user information. We obtained user t Harrison. We created a unique GUID for that user, and the end user was successfully created.

And we'd even log how long it took for that task to run. Right? So that entire task to create those five eighty users took around thirty seconds or so to complete. Right

Conclusion and Future Engagement

And with that, you know, we've demonstrated an automate workflow to automate some of our HR user onboarding processes. I hope that was extremely beneficial to everyone, you know, to see how easily automate can make those related type tasks. Unfortunately, it looks like we went past our scheduled time for today. So thanks everyone for hanging in there with us.

We won't have time for the live q and a during the session. But if you did leave a question in the chat, we'll collect those and we'll follow-up with you shortly with answers to any questions that you might have had. And I want to thank all of you for joining, you know, and learning a bit more about how automate can simplify your processes like your your HR, automation processes, you know, how simple Automate can make it. Thanks again for your time, and we look forward to seeing you, again.