Workflow Integration
Being able to provision an employee in less than a day is almost as important as the requirement that an employee be deprovisioned quickly and completely. Each of the products in our review can receive a feed from an HR system (such as PeopleSoft) and act upon the information received. When a new employee's data is entered into the HR system, it is fed into the product and the provisioning process begins. Changes to an employee's status are also picked up and applied throughout that person's career with the company.
Workflow and approvals are part of that process. While basic access across the enterprise may be provisioned automatically, administrators may still want control over some other systems. Or, while you may want the provisioning solution to manage the process, you may still want account creation and modification to remain manual. We desired flexibility in this area; some systems required approval from the system administrator, while others were provisioned without any intervention.
Stuff4U also needed to deal with situations in which the primary approver of a resource may be unavailable. We wanted to be able to escalate an approval that wasn't received in a specified period of time--a capability often found in network-management systems. We were pleased by enRole's ability to define team-based approvals and escalation support. This feature is especially helpful where a team of employees provides approval or authorization of resources. Waveset's Lighthouse also offered compelling support for this procedure but required us to define a specific role or employee for escalation and approval.
The tools available within enRole, Lighthouse and eProvision for defining the workflow process impressed us. All three products are Web-based and offer a robust, graphical method of capturing the business process and provisioning policies. A nontechnical business manager could use any of these solutions to define the process easily. Novell's Identity Provisioning for Employees is more flexible than the others, but nontechnical employees will have difficulty using it. To solve this shortcoming, Novell says it is developing a graphical way to construct rules.
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