“Everything ends; you just have to figure out a way to push to the finish line.”
— Jesse Itzler
Last time, we wrapped up the work on the example Service Account dashboard, although we did leave off a few potential enhancements that could improve its value. There is always more that could be done, such as the addition of an Admin Perspective showing all of the accounts and requests or an Expiring State showing all of the accounts that are coming up for review. Since this is just an example, we don’t need to invest the time in building all of those ideas out; some things should be left as an exercise for those who would like to pull this down and play around with it.
What we should do now, though, is take a quick step back and see what we have so far and what might be left to do before we can call this good enough to push out. When we first set out to do this, we identified the following items that would need to be developed:
- A Scoped Application
- A Master account table
- A technology type control table
- One or more Service Catalog items to create, alter, and terminate accounts
- A generic workflow for the catalog item(s)
- A type-specific workflow for each type of account in the type table
- Some kind of periodic workflow to ensure that the account is still needed.
We have basically created everything on our list except for that last item, but we have also indicated that the process to check back every so often and see if the account was still needed is something that could be handled by a stand-alone generic product that could perform that function for all kinds of things that would benefit from a periodic review. If we assume that we will turn that process over to a third party, then we would seem to have just about everything that we need.
There is one other thing that would be helpful, though, and we neglected to included it on our original list. It would be nice to have some kind of menu item to launch all of these processes that we have built, so let’s put that together real quick and get that out of the way. I am thinking of something like this:
- Service Accounts
- New Service Account
- My Service Accounts
- Service Accounts
- Service Account Types
The first item would initiate a request for the Service Account Catalog Item, the second would bring up the dashboard, and the last two would just bring up the list view of our two tables. Those last two would also be limited to admins only and the rest would be open to everyone. Here is the high-level menu entry.
… and here are the four submenu options for this high-level menu item:
Which produces a menu that looks like this:
So that’s about it for this little example project. Again, this is not intended to be a fully functional product that you would simply install and start using. This is just an example with enough working parts to get things started for anyone who might want to try to create something along these lines. Obviously, you would have your own list of types, your own implementation workflows for each type, your own approval structure for each type, and your own language in all of the notices, so it’s not as if someone could build all of that out in a way that would work for everyone. But for anyone would like a set of parts to play with to get things started, here is an Update Set that contains everything that we have put together during this exercise.
