Power To The People: Delegate User Management

A SharePoint Admin’s work schedule can be pretty hectic, and in many cases (way too many by my lights) may be just one more hat you’ve been asked to wear in addition to your main role in your company.  I hope it’s just hectic and not the latter, because your company, like many others I’ve seen, will have grossly underestimated the planning, skills, resources, etc. that are needed to manage and maintain a successful and efficient SharePoint operation.

Regardless of which bucket you fall in to, Bamboo Solutions is there to help as always. User Management tasks can be easily delegated to the helpdesk or other non-admins without having to give full network or SharePoint access. These delegated users can perform the tasks that he/she has been given access to, which leads to an increase in security since you no longer have to assign admin privileges to multiple individuals within a company.

The Bamboo Solutions SharePoint Administration Suite comes with a wealth of tools to tackle virtually any user management task. Let’s take a look at one of the most common tasks, User Account Setup.

Do you happen to remember the careerbuilder™ commercials that had chimps working in an office setting wherethe guy kept getting frustrated because he was surrounded by monkeys? Ok, I’m not saying you’re surrounded by monkeys, but we’ve made User Account Setup dead simple to use, and have taken out all of the guess-work for your delegated users…or, to put it another way, we've made it so simple that a monkey could use it.

User Account Setup

Out-of-the-box SharePoint does not provide IT administrators the ability to create user accounts in their directory services provider and in SharePoint simultaneously. Because of this, IT administrators are responsible for managing users for SharePoint customer portals, department sites, hosted applications, and the entire corporation in both Active Directory or NT and SharePoint separately. Offloading some of this work to users that the IT administrator has selected and granted special permissions to, allows the IT administrator to focus on higher priority tasks while not worrying about violating security policies.

There are multiple levels of security in place to ensure only the correct delegated users can gain access to and use User Account Setup, but that is easy to manage too, because we are simply using SharePoint’s Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) security to manage who has rights to access the page and create new users.

You have the option to define whether your new users are going to be added to SharePoint Groups and/or Permission Levels. You can then easily designate which SharePoint Groups and/or Permission Levels the new accounts will be added to. Seriously, you’ve got all the control you need here without confusing your delegated user.

User Account Setup is also flexible. If you desire the newly created accounts to automatically be added beneath a predefined Organizational Unit, you can specify that in the Web Part configuration. Or you can optionally allow your delegated users to select from predefined Organizational Unit and Security Group settings during the account creation process.

Now that the User Account Setup is configured, your delegated users access the secure page and simply enter some information into a form and, in four simple steps, you’ve now got new user accounts created based on the settings you have defined.

Wow, now you have time to check out the other tools in the Bamboo SharePoint Administration Suite that will allow you to delegate even more control and save you even more time!