Announcing the User Manager for Sites Web Part - Delegate User Management

Creating and managing users and groups in SharePoint tends to mean a lot of work for IT. This can create a bottleneck, where front line employees like site managers have to funnel requests for user management to IT, and wait for them to have time to make changes and respond. There are several good reasons for IT to be in control of user account creation and management, not the least of which are security concerns and IT's understanding of how users fit into the overall system.

The problem is, most IT managers have plenty of other work to keep them busy, without constantly having to provision users and manage minor account changes. Often, there are site managers or other front line personnel that know what changes need to be made, but are not empowered to do so. Wouldn't it be great if IT could delegate limited abilities to these managers to allow them to create and manage their own users and groups?

We think it would, and that's why we've built the new User Manager for Sites Web Part. This part allows specified users to create user accounts (in AD and SharePoint, or AD only), change passwords, remove users from a site collection, add and remove users from groups, create/delete/email SharePoint groups, and more, all from a simple, single interface. At the same time, it lets IT where and how users are created, and even exclude important user accounts from being displayed within the tool.

The name may be slightly confusing, as the Web Part is scoped at the site collection level (hence the plural "Sites" in the name), but here is how it works:

Administrative account credentials are stored in the Web Part's control panel. Our suggestion (best practice) is to create a new account expressly for this purpose. This account should be a Site Collection administrator account, have the rights to create and modify AD users, and reset passwords. Beyond that, IT can lock the account down as they see fit.

From there, Site Collection admins (the only users that can access most of the configuration settings for the part) provide the LDAP path and SharePoint group whose users can access the Web Part (again, we suggest creating a new group just for this). Site Collection admins can also define whether certain things are surfaced during account creation, like SharePoint group and permissions assignment. All this is done in the Tool Pane, and is therefor unique to that instance of the Web Part.

Additional settings within the Web Part itself are global within the site collection, and allow Site Collection admins to define which profile fields from the LDAP are used in the tool (and in what order they are presented), which email server/address to use when sending email from the tool, and what user accounts should be (for lack of a better word) "invisible" to the Web Part.

Once all of this is configured, any user in the defined SharePoint group can access the Web Part and begin managing users and groups, without requiring constant IT support. This is a classic example of a "Win-Win" scenario. Managers can handle their own users faster since they can do it directly, and it frees up cycles for IT without sacrificing control. Whether you're the IT group looking to delegate some of your work, or the front line manager looking to take control of your own users, you owe it to yourself (and the other group) to give User Manager for Sites a try. Take it for a spin, and see how it can help. Like all of our products, you can try it free for 15-days.