“GroupID gives us the peace of mind that our distribution groups are perfectly managed and up to date. With the cases we have, there is absolutely no room for error.
About
Our Client is a prestigious, full-service multinational law firm. Headquartered in Los Angeles, they have numerous teams of 1,600+ attorneys and 1,200+ staff members in 20+ offices across four continents.
Background
The Client was primarily struggling with creating and maintaining distribution lists. They have a variety of practice groups with various partners, associates, and other staff members related to the specific practice that needed to be organized. They required a tool that allowed them to maintain accurate data in Microsoft Active Directory by provisioning, de-provisioning, and synchronizing changes from their HR data source. GroupID needed to transform the Client’s Active Directory into an authoritative repository for identity information by synchronizing databases and identity stores.
GroupID also needed to provide the capability for provisioning and de-provisioning, and mapping business processes to automation. The Client then tasked us to automate the creation and management of their Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory distribution lists and security groups, while dynamically maintaining groups based on rules that are applied to their directory data.
Challenges
Creating and Maintaining Distribution Lists:
The firm has different practice groups that send emails to various partners, associates, or the entire practice group itself. They have Active Directory (AD) attributes populated from their HR system (PeopleSoft) that feeds into AD. They would then like to target from HR to AD to create specified distribution lists (14-15 per practice group). Ideally, one distribution list would be an opt-in, another for partners in the US, International Partners, US Associates, International Associates, etc. Eventually, this would pyramid up to an entire practice group distribution list.
Solution: GroupID Automate
Leveraging Managerial Dynasties:
The firm has attorneys that register with their primary practice group but want to be part of a secondary practice group to get emails, updates, and more
Solution: GroupID Automate
Populating Data from HR
The Client uses a couple empty extension attributes to populate data from HR. They needed to be able to do it if there are multiple values in an extension attribute. GroupID was able to define a delimiter to identify multiple values. It then defined a separator and tackled a multivalued attribute and extension attributes, custom attributes, extended attributes, etc. The goal is to highlight every attribute indexed in the global catalog. Thus, when the Client extends its schema (and used custom attributes), they are all there.
Solution: GroupID Synchronize
Defining Security Groups:
The Client has a Chair for each practice group and needed to create security groups based on information from HR.
Solution: GroupID Automate. We assigned someone to be the owner of the group. It can be a security group
and all the members of that group can even be the owner by default.
Creating a Distribution List and Converting it into a Security Group:
Solution: GroupID Automate. You can create a distribution list in AD or Azure AD. It can then be converted into a smart group or a dynasty depending on one’s preference.
Mapping Attributes in AD:
We need the data to be in AD for smart group membership and nested groups. This is due to grouping users based on their departments (which is in AD). The Client needs a bi-directional data sync from SQL to AD. This was accomplished and it runs based on a schedule (you can have a schedule for a single job or multiple jobs grouped together).
Solution: GroupID Synchronize
“Secure information exchange is everything for a firm like ours. GroupID simplifies what had been a complex, labor-intensive process.”